esjewett.com

I've been doing a bit of research on widgets for the day job. Hopefully I'll be able to make the results of that work available in some form within the next month. In the meantime, here's a demo showing how web standards are creating a situation in which widgets and dashboards are becoming more self-service. (The movie opens in a pop-up.)

The enabling technologies in the video above are

• Creation of dynamically updating gadgets from within Google Docs ("gadget" is Google-ese for "widget")
• Safari/Dashboard Web Clip functionality available in OS 10.5, which allows you to turn a piece of a page into a Dashboard widget.

Key functionalities that we are seeing are the ability to create meaningful, dynamic content in a self-service environment as well as easy re-mixing of content into personal dashboards as needed.

In other words, you don't need to be a programmer to do cool and useful stuff, though you do have to have a fair amount of patience on the widget creation side of the house. If history is any guide, the amount of patience required will decrease significantly as the user interfaces to this technology improve.

We're seeing similar trends in the enterprise space. Technologies are pretty much in place but take-up isn't great, probably because of similar pain points in user interface and ongoing work embedding re-mixing and dashboarding services into traditional information workflows.