Widgets are really cool!

I found the Yahoo Widgets Engine when I was browsing IBM's community site IBM Web Innovation, which itself is pretty cool. Find more similar spaces or create your own if you miss one at developerwork community topic spaces.

Downloading the Yahoo Widget Engine will grant you access to to download around 4000 different widgets. I just started play with it and some useful and/or funny ones are widgets for displaying:

• Wheather
• Flickr photos
• Notes mail
• Clock
• Recipes
• IBM information like news, stocks, promotions, general search or the employee directory. The last one is pretty handy. It actually gives me information like email, phone number, city and country for any IBM employee in the world (not Sam Palisano though... hmm..). I can recall several times when I wanted contact information and had some trouble finding it.
  
  Here's a screenshot from the IBM Widget showing search results from the Employee Directory. This one is public available information of Ed Brill's contact information.
  
  
  
  
• radio
• gmail
• itunes player
• del.icio.us
• and much more

Just click on the widget in the widget bar and a window will open the actual widget, like the IBM widget in the screenshot above. I really enjoy web-based widgets to put on your blog and so on and desktop widgets have not really been working for me earlier. I'll give it a shot now and see if it becomes useful to me.

More widgets here for websites and desktops (thank's Alex).

Technorati tags:
Widget, Yahoo, IBM, Desktop