Widgets are Applications without Boundaries

There is a line between what is a widget and what is not a widget. That line, however, is not drawn in the sand - that is, it depends on who you ask. Some people will say that a widget is a little piece of code that you can embed in your website and nothing more (a novelty at best), or that can be virally propagated, or is a read-only view into some combination of interesting data. To me (and my team at Nth Penguin), the line is simply this: a widget is an application without boundaries. Simple, eh? OK, now let me explain what I mean...

First of all, there are some rules to what we view as a widget:

1. A widget is web-aware. That is something that sometimes goes without saying, but it's important. It doesn't mean a widget is limited to living in a website (as is evident by the presence of desktop widget platforms by Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft), but just means a widget must be able to live on the web, be distributed via the web (i.e. easily syndicated), talk to the web, get its data from the web, etc.
2. A widget is functional on its own. It can be delivered standalone with its own URI, or embedded in various contexts (a gadget in the sidebar of someone's blog is only one example) - which brings me to the next rule...
3. A widget can be embedded inside any context, which includes within other widgets. I know I mention this in rule 2 above, but this is really important. A widget can be its own sandboxed application or a pretty box of data, but it can also double as a component within a larger widget, or application - lending its functionality to a bigger (or just different) idea.
4. There is no upper bound to how many levels of embedding can be done, or to how many times a widget can be extended. Widgets are mutable. They are all able to be used as building blocks. This means that widgets must be discoverable and furthermore that their functionality be easily discoverable by both humans and other widgets.

So there you have it, four simple rules which together comprise the line that defines what is a widget and what is not a widget (to us).

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