John Dowdell has a post about Widget neutrality and he links to a Yahoo Widget Blog post that went around this week and was billed as a pretty good comparison between the various widget platforms. However as Tony noted in JD’s comments, SpringWidgets and WidgetBox are two biggies that weren’t mentioned.

Widgets have been really taking off in the past few months, and I think partly it’s because they’re new, but also because there’s a lot of value in bringing important data right to the users screen where they can easily access it. yourminis has started a pretty impressive widget platform, Niall Kennedy had a widget conference, WidgetsLive, last fall, and Apollo is often talked about as a technology that would enable powerful desktop widgets.

All of the excitement is more than justified. I have to believe that part of it stems from the ability to “web enable” your desktop with important information. But in the end, I think the most successful widgets will tie back to bigger properties and they will be an important part of any Rich Internet Application strategy. Desktop widgets keep the application right in front of users even while they aren’t watching it and web widgets allow users to share a small part of the application with their friends on blogs or MySpace pages. The reason I think widgets are so important is because I think they’ve helped speed the adoption of Rich Internet Applications. People are seeing how great the widgets can be and are taking the next step and using those applications. As a result, the better widgets (which often tend to come from Flash-based RIAs) are getting more users and helping all the parent application grow. Rich Widgets draw users to rich applications.

[tags]Widgets, Rich Internet Applications, Flash, Yahoo, yourminis, WidgetBox, WidgetsLife, SpringWidgets[/tags]