What is a Widget?

I’ve had widgets on my mind lately.

Following definition via Wikipedia

A web widget is a portable chunk of code that can be installed and executed within any separate HTML-based web page by an end user without requiring additional compilation. They are derived from the idea of code reuse.
Other terms used to describe web widgets include: gadget, badge,
module, capsule, snippet, mini and flake. Web widgets often but not
always use DHTML, JavaScript, or Adobe Flash.

Widgets are a big part of what we do here. We have our widget gallery where people can grab and customize widgets that display everything from their own Amazon wishlist to New York Times bestsellers, to the featured stocks from Wallstrip. People can also use our BlueOrganizer Firefox add-on to create custom widgets containing whatever books, music, movies, and more that they’d like.

What this leads me to think is that whether we call these things “widgets” or something else is not important. It does not matter what we call them, it matters what they do and how they do it. If people can easily showcase what they are interested in and find important, then you can call it whatever you want. Or to paraphrase Shakespeare:

“What’s in a name? That which we call a widget, by any other name would still be installed and executed within any separate HTML-based web page and express the interests of that page’s author.”