ReadWriteWeb

Before any professional investor makes a play in a new market, she makes or acquires a reasonable estimate of its size. Not only does demand come into play, but the availability of resources with which a healthy level of demand may be supplied. You can't create a market simply by flooding it with products that people will decide, based on their wide availability, that they somehow want.

The very first pictures of "Longhorn," the development build of Windows that became Vista and Windows Server 2008, were characterized by a rich sidebar along one side of the screen. The moment Microsoft revealed pictures of these early builds, it told developers and members of the press that this sidebar constituted a new ecosystem - a garden where a wellspring of new, small, and useful apps will grow and flourish.

In Apple's next mobile operating system iOS 5, there are now integrated widgets for core apps like stocks and weather available in the operating system's new Notifications Center. This Android-like drop-down list of updates, accessible by swiping down from the top of the screen, alerts you to things like new emails, missed calls, voicemails and other updates from your installed apps.

But developers hoping to include their own widget-like notifications in the center were disappointed to find out that their only option was for text-based updates. However, thanks to a hack from developer Will Homer, there is now a way for jailbroken phones to run third-party widgets within the Notifications Center. Some of the first examples of these widgets are already out, and are ready for testing.

Dashboard software-as-a-service provider Netvibes and enterprise Java platform builder eXo have teamed up to create Netvibes Studio, a cloud-based development environment for building cross-platform widgets. Widgets built with Netvibes Studio can run in any browser, and can be deployed instantly into the Netvibes environment. Better yet, they will work in most major widget platforms, including iGoogle, Windows Vista, Apple Dashboard, Live.com, iPhone, Opera and more.

TAT, also known by its longer name "The Astonishing Tribe," is a mobile design and development firm best known among consumers for its forthcoming augmented reality application known as "Recognizr." The app (see previous coverage) is able to "see" a person's face though a smartphone's camera and then use facial recognition algorithms to identify them and serve up related information like recent status updates, Tweets and a LinkedIn bio, for example.

Unfortunately, we have some bad news about that ground-breaking app: it's been killed. However, we have other exciting news that may lessen the blow.

Imagine adding real-time, authentic, positive customer testimonials from social media sites to your own website, with a single line of Javascript. A startup called ThingBuzz has created a widget that displays Twitter and Facebook messages that contain links to your pages and positive sentiment, in a Growl-style pop-up in the corner of your page. It's called Buzz Growl.

Founded Choon-Hong Peck, former Director of Engineering at video platform Brightcove, Thingbuzz launches today with free accounts and will offer premium accounts with further customization soon. The company says its interface was inspired by the related articles fly-in on The New York Times site, and the similarities are clear. I expect this is a widget that many site owners will be interested in using. It will be all the more appealing once a few key problems with the service are solved.

The recent radical redesign of the Twitter homepage integrated media like photos and video into the sidebar of every user's page, and today the company announced that it has partnered with an outside organization to launch the first widget that's usable - and sharable - from inside Twitter. Micro-lending group Kiva has built a widget that lets Twitter users learn about and track Kiva loans all around the world.

Could this be the start of something more? It's not hard to imagine widgets in the Twitter sidebar from other services, like presentation decks from SlideShare or PDFs from Scribd, for example.

In a blog post over the weekend, Facebook announced that it will remove application boxes from its service on August 23. As we explained recently, boxes enable Facebook users to display third party content on their profile pages. Examples include a list of the books you're reading, the latest movies you've watched, tweets you've made.

I think this move by Facebook is a great shame, because it's very relevant social content and boxes display it for longer on your Facebook profile. In case you missed it first time round, here's what this move by Facebook means to you...

Earlier this week I complained that Facebook widgets are a mess. Widgets (a.k.a. "boxes") enable Facebook users to display third party content on their profile pages. Examples include a list of the books you're reading, the latest movies you've watched, tweets you've made. Alert readers pointed out that in fact Facebook plans to completely scrap boxes from a user's profile.

This is a great shame, because it's very relevant social content and boxes display it for longer on your Facebook profile. So essentially, with this move Facebook is relegating the importance of both third party content and persistent content.

Until now, Wolfram Alpha's computational knowledge engine was mostly tied to the project's website. Starting today, however, users will also be able to use the Wolfram Alpha Widget Builder to bring some of Wolfram Alpha's power to their own sites. The service, which is launching as a public beta today, allows anybody to quickly create a Wolfram Alpha-powered widget without any programming knowledge. Later this year, Wolfram also plans to re-launch the Wolfram Alpha API, which is currently too expensive for most developers (even students currently pay a minimum of $60 to use the API).

KickApps, a provider of enterprise-grade hosted social media platforms, announced the release of KickApps for IBM's WebSphere Commerce today. Websphere Commerce users will have the ability to integrate KickApps social media features into their stores and create highly targeted offers based on customer behaviors. The new "eSpots" feature of the product will allow users to create their own widgets to place on other web sites.