Whats a Widget

no accepted definition of a widget. This is probably because the word itself has quite a long history and can mean different things in different situations.
The phrase 'Acme Widget Co.' has long been used as a standin for a generic company that produces, well, anything. In this case, a widget is a sort of mysterious manufactured item, the sort of thing that made America a great manufacturing power. Wikipedia references the first usage of the word widget, when an artist must choose between making music, or making 'a living by accepting a soul-deadening job in a factory that makes "widgets". The text of the play intentionally refrains from revealing what "widgets" are; clearly, they represent any purely mercantile commodity that has no artistic or spiritual value.' Moved to the computer world, widget has long had its own meaning(s):Pronounced wih-jit. (1) A generic term for the part of a GUI that allows the user to interface with the application and operating system. Widgets display information and invite the user to act in a number of ways. Typical widgets include buttons, dialog boxes, pop-up windows, pull-down menus, icons, scroll bars, resizable window edges, progress indicators, selection boxes, windows, tear-off menus, menu bars, toggle switches and forms.
(2) The term also refers to the program that is written in order to make the graphic widget in the GUI look and perform in a specified way, depending on what action the user takes while interfacing with the GUI.
The term widget is used to refer to either the graphic component or its controlling program or to refer to the combination of both.
More recently , with the coming of the ubiquitous web, the word has moved on again, and has been used to describe small applications that are designed to exist within an environment such as an OS based desktop, again from Wikipedia:
' ...a widget is a small specialised desktop application that provides easy access to frequently used functions or provides some visual information. Early examples of widgets were desk accessories on Mac OS. Typical widgets include News aggregators, clocks, calculators, calendars, desktop notes and weather forecasts.
Originally, desk accessories were developed to provide a small degree of multitasking, but when real multitasking OSes became available, these were replaced by normal applications. However, the widget model is attractive because of ease of development. Most widgets can be created with a few images and from less than ten to several hundred lines of XML/JavaScript/VBScript, depending on their complexity.
On Windows, support for widgets is mainly provided by Yahoo! Widgets (formerly Konfabulator), Samurize, DesktopX, Kapsules, AveDesk, and similar widget engines.Native support for widgets is included in Mac OS X v10.4 (via Dashboard).Also, as previously mentioned, Microsoft will support Gadgets natively in Windows Vista via the Windows Sidebar.'However, even more recently the word widget has been swept up to describe a pseudo-application or any functionality that can be embedded or plugged in to a web based application such as a blog or a social network, though anything that is html based can allow embeds of one sort or another.