Widgets

I don't like widgets. As a concept, they're okay— little chunks of embeddable content can often be useful. Some of these even turn out to be really good ideas; for instance, YouTube videos, maps, IM status buttons, and Twitter tickers.

However, good ideas are not the norm. Many widgets are simply stylized news feeds. These are good for the content creators, of course, but why anyone would want to put a ticker with someone else's brand and someone else's content on their site is a mystery to me. They clash and nobody's uses them anyways. It seems kind of Geocities-ish to me, though I guess that could explain the appeal.

But sometimes widgets go beyond useless and into the realm of annoying. Anyone who's been on Facebook in the last year or so knows all about these; they plague many profiles in the form of "Top Friends" and "wat kinda lvr r u" apps. To be fair, these seem to be mostly limited to social networking sites, but they have been popping up elsewhere more and more lately.

Overall, I guess I have no problem with widgets, in the same sense that I have no problem with knick-knacks or makeup. It's all a matter of how you use them.