We discovered 3 impressive new widgets today, from Google, Blinkx and 30 Boxes, and we decided to write about all of them in one post. Widgets are the non-developer’s “small pieces loosely joined,” they are the hottest example right now of data portability on the web. They are fun and useful.

Everyone’s got a “widget strategy.” There are widget marketplaces (see WidgetBox, LabPixies and Wigipedia), widget blogs (see WidgetsLab and Widgetoko). There was a whole conference on widgets earlier this month.

Perhaps this post is just us trying to get it out of our system once and for all - but in all likelihood widgets are here to stay. They provide a lot of functionality to website publishers. Widgets are in their infancy, though, and we’re all still learning how to best use them. After this I promise to never embed 3 widgets in one blog post again.

Blinkx Wall

Audio and video search engine Blinkx now lets website publishers place a wall of search result previews on any site using a widget. The Wall below displays search results for the phrase Net Neutrality. Give it a chance to load, it’s way too slow, hopefully that can be improved. The display is fed by RSS - so its contents will change as new search results become available. It could be over the top, but the size and number of nodes in the wall can be changed - this is the “tiny” version. I’ve used Blinkx feeds in the past to create, for example, a page listing the most recent audio and video news about Zimbabwe. This Blinkx Wall is a much more interesting way to display search results. The down side of this is that search results often include video that’s been removed for copyright reasons - video producers certainly wouldn’t want search driving viewers to their work (albeit on other sites). We found out about this widget at Beet.TV, one of the best places to learn about video online.

Two more widgets, from Google and 30 Boxes, after the fold.
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30 Boxes co-founder Narendra Rocherolle emailed me today to tell me about their new Webtop service - an Ajax Mac OS-X style deskop tool that gives you instant access to your 30 Boxes Calendar, Gmail, Flickr and other web sites and services that you choose to integrate. Users can also set the background image to their own picture.

It’s definitely a shot at the Ajax home page crowd, like the recently funded Netvibes and PageFlakes, as well as Flash home page site Goowy.

Some days I really do think we are back in the nineties. The first thing I thought of when I saw this was long-dead Desktop.com. In this case, though, things may turn out differently. 30 Boxes in an incredibly user-friendly calendar, the kind of thing the Internet masses could take to once they find out about it. Webtop will give those users another reason to try out 30 Boxes.

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