Fat Widgets, the kind of widgets that are fat  is not because they occupy lots of screen real state but because they slow down the load of a profile page, a blog or a website.

Fat widgets: a lesson in not understanding the end user

This is a problem Duncan Riley brought up last week. this was of course before Flash 10 or Silverlight 2 release that improve rendering but he does makes a point. fat widgets are no good and while they may load faster thanks to Flash and Silverlight latest releases. the plugins will not be able to anticipate if the widget is well made or if the service hosting it is good. any of those two things can ruin a good widget and  that should be a very important thing to note for anyone doing a widget:

1.-It is well made?.

Does it loads well in slow or average machines?. this is important with the increase of netbooks in the market.

2.-The host is good?

What does it matters if your widget is light and well made if your host sucks?. this will make your widget to not load properly,  load slowly or break. this can also affect every single page using your widget. so choose wisely.

This subject reminds me of Derek observations and my own from over a year ago. a lot has changed since then but. we are not in the clear yet. i hope in one year from now. i will not have to bring  this matter up again and that we finally get pass this issue.