Widgets, widgets, everywhere.

What’s the deal with all the widgets lately? Ten years ago, the term “widget” was used in business school in case studies where Company “X” produces “Widgets” at a profit margin of blah blah blah…

From what I can remember, Konfabulator (now Yahoo Widgets) gave a new definition to the term “widget” and ran nicely on both Macs and PCs. After Yahoo purchased Konfabulator, Apple threw their hat into the ring with Dashboard. Not to be outdone, Google, Netvibes, and now Adobe (Air) have gotten into the foray.

To be honest, I was a die-hard Konfabulator user, and even kept it running on my Mac even after I upgraded operating systems and started using Dashboard. As more and more widgets became available on Dashboard, I completely scrapped Konfabulator/Yahoo Widgets, and only got my widgets through Dashboard. As I migrated my digital life to be dependent on the internet (Gmail, Picasa, Google Docs, Netvibes, WordPress, Twitter, Facebook, etc.), I stopped using Dashboard. (I very rarely use it- in fact, the only widgets I use are iStat Pro, calculator, and Airport Radar.)

Enter Adobe. Recently they’ve launched AIR, which lets you run web-based widgets on your desktop (Mac and PC supported). If anyone is going to get me back to using widgets, it might just be Adobe. So far, I’m hooked on their Google Analytics suite, kuler desktop, and their twhirl Twitter client. They’re all proving themselves to be very feature-rich little applications that are actually useful to me (as opposed to the little time-wasters that used to litter my Apple Dashboard).

Have we reached the widget peak, or have our widgets just moved off of our desktops onto our iGoogle pages, Netvibes universes, iPhones, and Facebook profiles? After all, 9/10 widgets need an internet connection to be of an use.