Widget. It’s got a widget. A lovely widget. A widget it has got. Widget.

I very much enjoyed playing with widgets (and while we’re on the subject, just what is the connection between standalone web-page components and the little ball they used to put inside cans of Guinness?), in fact this marks the first occasion (and 22 Things into this programme, let’s be honest, the last) when I’ve actually done one of the Things before it’s come up as a task! Oh, yes, check out my flickr stream that’s been on my blog for several (you heard me right - several) weeks. Check me out, ladies and gentlemen, check me out. I suppose I simply must be living up to a man’s reputation as being “gadget obsessed”!

I decided to enter into the spirit of things and added another flicker stream to my blog, the “gallery” style widget this time as apposed to the scrolling one I’ve been using, as well as trying out a few more and finally settling on the “twitter” gadget you can see on the right-hand side (if you scroll down). The problem we have is that it’s tempting to over clutter your page and, in fact, I think I’ve probably gone a bit overboard despite my best intentions to keep it simple. This is a side effect of widgets (or gadgets) being so incredibly easy to set up and use, despite them being really quite clever. Usually you only need to select the gadget you are interested in, check or uncheck the features you want, and sometimes add your username, and that’s it – it’s on your blog or facebook page or whatever. Occasionally you can set up a widget from an external site (the mashable link I found very useful) but even then it’s very straightforward. I suppose the downside of this is that it’s making privacy a bit of an issue. If you have an online diary in the form of a blog and it interlinks with your twitter page, your facebook page, your flicker account et al, it would be quite easy for someone to find out quite a lot about you.

I also spent some time exploring the iGoogle widgets, including the suggested delicious widget. This is a perfect example of how easy they are to set up – two clicks and it was just about done. I have included a recent screen grab of my iGoogle page for your viewing pleasure – as you can see, there are quite a few widgets on there, as I have been using it since we set up our iGoogle pages in week 1! Most useful has been the London Underground map and planner widgets for my (very) infrequent trips into London. I think iGoogle has to be my favourite of all the Web 2.0 technologies we’ve discovered.