Widgets : Nice extra's or overkill ?

Filed in archive Web 2.0 on August 2, 2007

When content became the main thing on the internet and caused Web 2.0 to be invented, all kinds of systems were invented to syndicate this content. As always, only a handful of systems survived, and the most important one is of course rss. But besides rss, every webbased company of application now offers a widget, which is a tiny piece of code you can use on one website to reflect content of another website. Basically, this is exactly what rss does.

Although there are quite some cool widgets out there, and now there are even lots of websites that specialize in widget generation (Widgetbox, Widsets and others), I believe the web is overwhelmed with widget offerings. Actually, you can use the rss standard to syndicate content, and rss is more efficient as it transfers as plain text and therefore loads faster than widgets ever will. To be precize, if you use a widgetbox widet for example on you website, your site will have to wait for widgetbox to pick up content from a source website, generate the widget and transfer it to your site (depending on used technology and code of course). Yes they often look nice graphically, but rss does the trick so why use widgets in the first place ?