I've recently noticed several good blog posts about what makes a good widget - especially these three - one from Ivan Pope called "Ten Sins of the Widget makers" , one from Stefan Juhl "The 6 Essential Elements of A Great Website Widget" and one from Lawrence Coburn called "Anatomy of a Widget".
Ivan makes several good points about the being well-behaved when being embedded in a web page. The Others Online profile widget started out with essentially the same attitude - the widget should inherit the ambient look and feel of the hosting web page, the publisher of the widget should control the layout, sizing, color and borders to more closely adapt to the layout of their blog or page. One tricky thing which we also addressed was the page load time. The point of the page is to show content, and widgets are secondary, so we decided to delay rendering of profiles until the page has completed loading. Not many other widgets do this and those widgets negatively impact the apparent page load time. I hope widget developers read Ivan's post and take his suggestions to heart - all widgets should be well-behaved widgets and consider the needs of the page author above their own desire to be displayed first.
Lawrence's post talks about the value that a widget should provide to the publisher as well as the features that are valuable to a widget developer. In contrast to one point he raises there is a unique aspect of the Others Online widget - we aren't using our widget super powers to drive traffic back to our site, we are giving this visibility to relevant bloggers.
The comments on these blog posts are also valuable to read - check them out.
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