Widgets

Widgets are little programs that sit on your desktop and deliver information. From Thompson-Peterson's blog:

This morning I downloaded Konfabulator, and within minutes tiny little widgets appeared on my XP desktop - a clock, a window showing pictures from one of my folders, a Yahoo search input box, a battery level indicator, a WiFi signal level indicator, and the weather in Palo Alto. Soon I downloaded and fired up Digg Digger, a widget that displays top stories from Digg, a technology news website.

When I downloaded Combarss, the possibilities started to click. Combarss is an RSS feed-reading widget that combines the headlines from several feeds into a single "river of news” (Dave Winer’s term). I quickly added several of my favorite feeds: feeds from Sinkingships.net, Eduweb, Collegewebeditor, and Marc Canter. Now, without firing up my news reader, I can glance at my desktop and see the titles of the latest posts from these blogs.

Personally, I don't want a bunch of extra programs paratisizing my CPU, but there are thousands of widgets out there.