Loving Widgets

I recently got a new laptop with Vista and discovered widgets or gadgets as they are called in Vista.

I have four gadgets in my Windows sidebar that I can't live without now: the clock, a sticky notes, a RSS feed box and a personal pictures slideshow.

Excited after some weeks of using the gadgets I tried adding a few to my blog (and promptly removed some of them). Yahoo!, I found, has a widgets channel, which is great except that when you try to download one widget you get a whole Yahoo! widget taskbar on your desktop. The Yahoo! taskbar itself is annoying since I didn't want it (I am looking to get just one widget!). It was difficult to move around on the desktop and I ended up uninstalling it along with widgets I had downloaded from the channel.

Anyway, I found on the Yahoo! Widgets channel that most widgets are variations of the four kinds that I already have on my desktop.

Meanwhile, Engagdet has Niall Kennedy write a column called Enwidget. So far it has a grand total of two posts.

Is the widget fad over?