idgetsWay

Patrick July 20th, 2007

One of the projects I’ve been working on required that I define a variety of ways of thinking about widgets. As a user experience consultant by trade, I naturally first gravitated to the widget user population, and found it useful to categorize widgets by their intended user. Let me explain.

There are a lot of widgets that I use that I acquire and consume for my own personal purposes. For example, I have a variety of Dashboard Widgets, like Radar In Motion (one of my favorites, especially in the summer south) that are for very personal purposes. I invoke them on my Mac, use them, and then put them away. Because these widgets satisfy a very personal need, I call these “Me Widgets.” With a very broad brush, you can classify all the desktop (Apple, Yahoo, Microsoft), mobile (Widsets, ZenZui, S60, iPhone), and webtop (iGoogle, NetVibes, PageFlakes, FreeWebs) widgets as Me Widgets. Hybrid webtop/desktop widgets (YourMinis, Springwidgets) also fit in this category.

Then there are widgets that are primarily used by one individual to share content with others who visit their blogs, social networking profile pages, and other websites or web pages. For example, Flickr widgets that display your photostreams in your sidebar are popular across blogs and social networks. As a user/publisher, you love the ease of use of adding Flickr to your site, but the primary purpose of the widget is to share those photos with other people. I call this category “We Widgets” because I acquire the widget, but others primarily consume it. We Widgets include the broad group of web widgets, like those served up by WidgetBox and others for use on Typepad, WordPress, Blogger, MySpace and other sites. All of the sidebar content blocks on idgetsWay are widgets, and would be considered We Widgets.

Of course, there are some widgets that can be both Me Widgets and We Widgets as well, and some that sound the same but work just differently enough that the versions are distinctly Me or We. A package tracker, for example, would seem to be a Me Widget, but if you run an intranet, other internal site, a blog about logistics, or a site with office/shipping related content, you might very well publish a package tracker on your site, making it a We Widget. Or, take the Yahoo Flickr Widget, which is inherently personal and therefore a Me Widget, or the Flickr Slideshow from Widgetbox, which is more of a We Widget allowing you to share photos with visitors to your site.

In some future post, I’ll explore the differences in benefits to content owners of We Widgets versus Me Widgets.

Technorati Tags: widget, gadget

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