Source: PC Magazine - June 2007
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1895,2129793,00.asp

By Cade Metz and Jamie Bsales

Yahoo! Widgets
In 2005, Yahoo! purchased Pixoria, the inventor of the modern widget, and now, less than two years later, the Yahoo! Widgets platform boasts nearly 4,000 of these nifty miniapplications. When you install the free platform (widgets.yahoo.com), Yahoo! automatically loads a handful of useful tools, including a photo viewer, a battery gauge, and a brand-new widget that streams songs from iTunes. But if you dig into the Yahoo! Widget Gallery (widgets.yahoo.com/gallery), you'll find all sorts of other gems.

We particularly like Remote Desktop, which gives you quick access to—you guessed it!—remote desktops, and PingPC, a way of instantly checking whether a machine is online or off. Yes, PingPC's lone dialog is in Italian. But you'll figure it out. If you're the programmer type, we can also recommend Code Converter, which instantly converts C# code to Visual Basic—and vice versa. Whatever type you are, don't miss Stormy Weather!, which serves up live Doppler radar images straight from the National Weather Service, or Reuters Reload, which gives you video feeds from eight different Reuters news channels.

Google Desktop Gadgets
Google's widget platform is tied to Google Desktop (desktop.google.com), the company's redoubtable desktop search tool. It doesn't offer nearly as many applets as Yahoo!, but you may find a number of tools you can't live without (especially if you're a die-hard Google user).

Our favorites include Skype Plugin, for quick-and-dirty online phone calls; eBay Auction Watch, for tracking online auctions; and Sketch Pad, for graphical collaboration between Google Talk users. You're the sort who sees the Web mostly as a reference tool? Check out Google Web Definitions, the quickest way to grab info on both words and concepts; Translate, which translates to and from countless foreign languages; and Weight Converter, which juggles grams, ounces, pounds, and U.S. tons.

Microsoft Gadgets
Sidebar, Microsoft's widget platform, is built right into Vista, and you can download additional widgets from the Windows Live Gallery (gallery.live.com). One of the coolest is Say It! You type a sentence and your PC says it. But we're also into Clipboard History, which gives you quick access to clipboard text Windows has already forgotten; Multi Meter, which provides meters for both halves of a dual-core CPU; and Terror Alert, which displays the current threat level from the Department of Homeland Security. (We may or may not be kidding about that last one).

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Niall Kennedy, The Widget Man
In November, tech blogger and podcaster Niall Kennedy (with a little help from Business 2.0 senior writer Om Malik) put together the world's first conference dedicated entirely to widgets, attracting more than 200 developers.

Q: What's a widget?

A: A widget is a mini-application that runs on your desktop, displaying at-a-glance information you care about. Weather, for example. News. Movie show times. The current status of your laptop battery. This information might come from your own computer or it might come from the Internet. I look at widgets as a manifestation of the dream we had some ten years ago, where we would all have agents that would go out onto the Internet and grab information for us.

Q: Now that Vista's in the widget game, is there still room for Yahoo! and Google?

A: The platforms differ quite a bit. Google widgets, for instance, are part of the Google Desktop Search product, so they very much integrate with that, tailoring everything from your news to your movie show times according to what you've been doing on your machine. I think you'll continue to see separate offerings—from Google and from Yahoo!

Q: How difficult is it to build your own widgets?

A: It's pretty simple. Typically, you start out with a template. So you can very easily set up an RSS feed or a podcast. In much the same way, you can create a countdown timer to your birthday or your favorite TV show. Each of the major engines, thanks to templates, does a good job of getting people up and running.