The other day I was upgrading to
Konfabulator 3.0
, otherwise known as
Yahoo! Widgets. A “widget” is basically a little piece of software that does a
simple task, usually by querying a database on the internet or some other
source via web services.
There are widgets for stocks, the time of day, sports
schedules, weather—things like that. Widgets are a big deal because they are
building blocks for a new way to get info delivered to computers over the internet. Instead of "browsing" the web or "searching" the internet, we can use to widgets to have what we want delivered automatically so we can consume it when we want it. RSS is another type of service that does stuff like this. Microsoft is working on its own version of these things—they
call them “gadgets” and they will work on their Windows Live world. More on that later.
Anyway, I was looking at the various widgets in the widget gallery offered by Yahoo! and created by developers all over the world using the open standards. One thing I saw was the Cup-A-Lerter. All it does is notify you when it is 3 o’clock, which coincides with the current Cup-A-Soup advertising program, which cajoles people to consume one of their soup products every day at 3 PM.
I’m not sure if the creator of the widget is an employee of the Cup-A-Soup Continuum, or if the widget is a part of their overall ad strategy, but I do know that Web Service Advertising is here to stay.