Wednesday, October 04, 2006

Google widgets set free

Google announced that their widgets (or gadgets) can now be used on third party webpages. I thought of trying some parasitic computing. Creating some modules that would store state. Whenever I would see a gadget on a page it would query another gadgets on some other page, retrieve or set some state, do something with it and set some state on a third widget somewhere else.
Unfortunately for some reason they explicitly say that recording state will invalidate your gadget:
* It cannot be inlined. For example, a syndicated gadget cannot modify the container page.
* It cannot store state. For example, a syndicated gadget cannot be a to-do list that stores personal list items for each user.
* Its functionality should not be dependent on each user specifying different user preferences.


I am not sure they work with blogs, but here goes a try.