Widgets? What the heck is a widget?
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Until recently, I have to admit, I wasn’t all that interested in “widgets” (you may have heard of them as “gadgets” if you are a Vista or Google user). I thought they were just way too simple of applications to be very useful. After reading a whole lot of buzz in the tech-media about them, I thought maybe I should look into them a bit. To my surprise, what I found was a plethora of useful tools and toys!
If you are not familiar with widgets and gadgets I’ll give you the 10,000 foot overview. They are little applications that run on your desktop and can quickly provide you with useful information on most any topic, or a diversion from reality with games and other toys. You have used things like these before I am sure: a desktop calculator, the old Minesweeper game, a sticky-note pad for quick notes, etc. These are all available as widgets. But what makes widgets really cool is the fact that they can gather up-to-date information from the Internet in real time. 
I have a weather widget that I look at often to check the current temp. Since I’m a web guy, I have a widget that lets me see how many hits my site is getting today. There are widgets for travel that keep you up to date on the latest hot deals. There are widgets that let you see what’s new at your favorite store. There are RSS widgets that let you quickly glance to see if your favorite blog site has any new articles. There are email widgets that watch your web mail and announce when you have new messages. The list goes on and on… sports, games, and so much more.
The nice thing about them is that I can get that up-to-date information without having to touch my browser at all. No Internet Explorer, no Firefox, no Safari. These things just connect directly to where they need to get the information from. It’s a real time savings for many things I do.
Interested?
Check out Yahoo Widgets for both Windows and Mac.
Check out Apple Widgets for you Mac users.
Check out Windows Gadgets for you Vista users.
We will definitely be making some widgets for download in the next few months. For sure one will be a Zeppelin branded widget to put on your desktop so that you can quickly see at-a-glance what’s new on our blog. I can see a few game ideas down the road and a few other ideas too.
If you think you might have a great potential use for a widget for your business, give me a shout! We’d love to explore this hot new technology to help bring your business’ brand to your customers’ desktops.
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