Gadget, Widget, Sidebar, Searchbar…Gadget Ads- Go Figure
Posted in E-Commerce, Free Software, Gadgets Widgets, Mobile, Web 2.0, Widgets by wayne.porter on May 7th, 2007 Sam again reports that Google is testing “Gadget Ads”. I find the choice of name interesting…and I still can’t figure this out.
Many of refer to these small applications as “widgets”, actually Google Labs refers to the Mac O/S flavor as a widget although lately we see their iterations as a “gadget”.
Microsoft calls them gadgets. When I search Google for “Microsoft widgets” I end up with a link to Microsoft Gadgets- a stand alone domain. In the MSFT world we have:
Web gadgets: run on a web site, such as Live.com or Spaces.Live.com
Sidebar gadgets: run on the desktop or be docked onto, run on the Windows Sidebar.
SideShow gadgets: run on auxiliary external displays, e.g. potentially mobile phones and other devices.
While we are on mobile let us not forget about ZenZui. Spun out of Microsoft as a separate company ZenZui’s mobile widget technology was developed by Microsoft’s Research lab, patented by Microsoft and Microsoft also helped the group raise funding and acquire tech.
Yahoo calls them widgets with their latest release- yes now it is simply Yahoo! Widgets. No more ‘Engine’. e.g. Yahoo Widget Engine (formerly known as Konfabulator).
If you want to really want to muck about in that debate you will note Apple’s Dashboard and Konfabulator. Here both programs used the term “widget” to describe the applications they ran. Apple was using the term “gadgets” to describe the widgets Dashboard ran before switching to “widgets” during the course of Mac OS X Tiger’s development for unknown reasons.
One one would think we could use a standard here? Perhaps the underlying technology they support, as well as the O/S, and their intended place of use (desktop, web page, mobile) helping define the debate. Which at this point might be irrelevant. Think-a-ma-bob might suffice for most.
E Commerce Free Software Gadgets Widgets mobile web2.0 widgets
Popularity: 8% [?]
[...] 4) Trendio offers RSS. What is Trendio? If you are a hard-core mover of “words” this simulation game, based out of Stockholm, might appeal to you. Trendio is a word-driven stock market where the stocks are words from the news: politicians, celebrities, companies, sport events, etc… The price of a word is relative to its popularity in the media. Three thousand news sources are scanned in real time to calculate the prices of all the words on the market and as is in the real stock market, you compose your portfolio with words that you believe will rise. You “win” if your predictions prove to be right…now they need a gadget or a widget… [...]
[...] Sam also goes on to write about Google and Gadgets. I wrote about that too- at leat a bit of history. I like Vista’s Gadgets…. Oddly enough Yahoo! was way ahead of the game, but I [...]