Widget. You hear the term all the time when people are talking about the Internet. But have you ever wondered what on earth it means?
You may be surprised to learn the term actually originated in the 1920s as a simple way to describe any small, generic item produced in manufacturing. At that time, if you made, for example, gears for a larger piece of machinery, you might instead say that you made widgets.
But now the term is commonly used to describe any small software application that can be installed and used in a page. Often, items such as clocks, weather updates, social media sharing tools, and similar things are widgets. They work by allowing people to copy and paste the embeddable code into their own pages. Some relatively new sites even allow people to build their own, completely customized widgets without requiring that the user be able to write code.
Today, desktop widgets are also available. They differ from the more common online widgets in that they are, as the name implies, placed on your desktop instead of on a web page.
If you are reading this because you are interested in placing a widget on your site, you need to remember that unless you are using a widget you have created, you will have no control over the content of the widget. However, you can always easily take it down if you decide the content is not a fit for your site.
As we increase our use of smart phones to access the internet, developers are creating widgets specifically for mobile devices. These tend to function more like desktop widgets, but they do serve an important purpose. They help make navigating the Web easier on a mobile device. The biggest challenge is creating a widget that can seamlessly run on all the different mobile platforms.