Widgets: What’s In a Name?

I’ve earned my living professionally in the Internet industry since 1994. As the industry has developed, the demand for new words and names to describe technology concepts and business activities has increased. From the beginning, industry denizens have re-purposed terms from other industries and even taken them from popular works of fiction. I mean, who really knew what an ‘Avatar’ was before Neal Stephenson popularized it in “SnowCrash?” The word ‘Cyberspace’ was taken from Gibson’s “Neuromancer” to describe all things Internet. One thing these new word uses have generally had in common – there was usually an obvious, or at least apparent, connection between the original definition and the new use.

So why is it so difficult to understand the term “widget?” I mean it’s a word nearly everyone has heard before. The problem is, for most people, the new use of the word has absolutely no relation to the common usage of the word… or does it? As I was doing research for this post, I came across the following definition on WhatIs.com – “In general, widget is a term used to refer to any discrete object, usually of some mechanical nature and relatively small size, when it doesn't have a name, when you can't remember the name, or when you're talking about a class of certain unknown objects in general.” So that’s it – it doesn’t actually have a name (or, if it does, I can’t remember it) so let’s call it a widget.

But I’m still not satisfied and continue to have blind faith that the Internet Intelligentsia had a reason for calling them widgets – whatever they are. A little bit of research reveals that the word has been defined and used in many contexts from economics to computer programming to television shows.

For fun, let’s briefly explore some of the many uses of the word with an eye toward understanding how its current meaning came about. According to Wikipedia, the word first occurs in the 1924 comedic play, Beggar on Horseback (1924), written by George S. Kaufman and Marc Connelly. The hero, a struggling composer, must choose between creating music that stimulates his soul but earns no money or earning a soul-crushing living in a "widget" factory. "Widget" is never explained, but clearly it is some mechanical product without artistic or spiritual value.

Without debating who created the term first, economists in the 20^th century began using the term “widget” as a placeholder name for an “object or, more specifically, a mechanical or other manufactured device.” Anyone who’s taken a business or economics class in college has no doubt heard the term in this context.

Widgets were later adopted by the object-oriented programming community to describe elements of a graphical user interface (GUI) that display information or provide a specific way for a user to interact with the operating system or application. In this context, widgets include icons, pull-down menus, buttons, selection boxes, progress indicators and many other devices for displaying information and for inviting, accepting, and responding to user actions. The term is believed to be a conflation of the terms “window gadget”.

Finally, the American Heritage dictionary defines widget as “a small mechanical device, as a knob or switch, esp. one whose name is not known or cannot be recalled”. This could explain some of the strange uses for the word like the "floating widget" found in kegs of beer - a hollow sphere; 3 cm in diameter that helps keep kegs of beer pressurized. You can have even more fun by typing “define: widget” into a Google search box.

So after acknowledging all the many uses of the word, I’d like to define it for the context of this post. A widget is a portable content window that can be used as the basic building block of digital distribution networks.

To continue this discussion in the proper context, we need to first define a few more terms: distribution, syndication and RSS. I’ll defer to the American Heritage dictionary definition for the first two. Accordingly, distribution is “the act of dispersing or the condition of being dispersed; diffusion”. Most people understand conceptually the idea of distributing content.

Continuing, syndication means “to publish simultaneously, or supply for simultaneous publication, in a number of newspapers or other periodicals in different places: Her column is syndicated in 120 papers.” If you substitute “websites” for “newspapers or other periodicals” then you have the proper context for my usage.

RSS (Really Simple Syndication or Rich Site Summary) is an XML format for delivering regularly changing web content. Many news-related sites, weblogs and other online publishers syndicate their content as an RSS Feed.

So then widgets - portable content windows that can be used as the basic building block of digital distribution networks – represent a new paradigm in the distribution of content for publishers, media companies and individual producers.

Here’s why. Widgets are portable – meaning they can be distributed on any website and then taken by a consumer and placed anywhere that accepts HTML – a social networking site, a personal blog or website, even a desktop. They can also contain any type of content – text, graphics, music, applications, interactive games, video or any combination thereof. When combined with RSS, widgets become powerful vehicles for content syndication – meaning publishers can automatically update or change the content within any widget regardless of where it ultimately resides.

So when you combine the capabilities of widgets - to carry any type of content, to be distributed anywhere on the web, to be automatically updated by its publisher and to ultimately be taken and “owned” by any consumer – you now have the building blocks of custom distribution networks between publishers and consumers. This is the future of content distribution on the web!

In my next post, I’ll further illuminate this concept by describing content syndication networks and how publishers, media companies and individual producers can begin building their own networks.