As with most things that spur discussion on the Blogosphere, there is a recent confusion about what is a widget and what it is not caused by a Usa Today article that makes a mess of a already convoluted matter that places all facebook  apps as  widgets and well, pretty much anything as a Widget something that of course have ticked off people like Nick O’Neill from All facebook and that in a attempt to simplify things goes to literal on what a widget is.

as i am not a stranger to discussions like this where terms and the use of words depends on form like when people call everything a hack, no matter if it is a method or a mod. in the end it was a futile discussion because everyone still calls everything a hack without distinction and a lot of the times without reason.

In this case is about the form of use and the form of presentation. lets take igoogle and live spaces as a example. a rare moment where Google and Microsoft thought that they had to rename their widgets as Gadgets. the reason to do that was because of the way they were going to be presented and the form they were going to be used, they are modular widgets distributed in a proprietary or unique ecosystem so given the attention to that, they found proper to state them as gadgets, something that reflects their modular nature.

meanwhile widget are now seen as a portable/embedded code where the function is generated elsewhere and just displayed on demand for users. something that does exemplifies the best aspect of widgets but cannot ignore other way of presenting them and forms of use, be them as installable (you host the code, you host the end display) mostly a case for website script widgets or Modular ( you get into a platform of your choice,there are predefined non shareable or undockable widgets generated for your use with the platform) as you can see in live spaces as the perfect match for that example and to some extend Blogger and wordpress.

The bottom line is that it really don´t matters if you prefer one or another, what mater is that widgets can come in many forms and that  such forms affect their nature so you cannot pin them to one sole definition.

besides that confusion, the usa today article talks about how widgets exploded into the web and now can define a start up succes or how a widgets can BE the main service of a start up. something that has really changed everything in 2007.

Facebook Apps or Widgets,which are better?

Widgets make a big splash in the net