I actually know of a developer who’s widgets pay for his constant round the world travel. He develops in his spare time and makes a steady stream of revenue from it. I seriously doubt that steady stream of income would stop abruptly, unless he was ejected from an affiliate program without warning - something which I doubt happens often.

Before I start my rant, let me introduce myself as one of the main developers of eBay Sidebar Tool for Windows Sidebar. I have to say, a lot of widgets/gadgets out there annoy me. But the ones that utilise APIs actually have a point and there’s nothing sucky about them. Widgets were originally intended to be more accessible than desktop/web applications and they really live up to their purpose when they use an API.

With regards to the business model, we could have left our “gadget” at version 1 and we’d most likely not make much less on affiliate commissions. It’s the ambition to make a really useful tool that drives us to continue developing it over time. The affiliate commissions just enable us to do so. While facebook/blog/webservice widgets might not be useful to you, a female developer with more than widget-sized ambition, they *are* useful to a lot of people. I’d say our gadget is a pretty good example of this. eBay one of the biggest sites on the web. Millions of people use it religiously and for those people who have to log in, check all their items then come back and do the same thing all over again in 30 minutes. The fact that they can see all this at a glance is much more productive and from the number of people that rely on our widget I think I can safely say that they don’t think Widgets suck.

That all being said, we still make mostly affiliate based widgets and there’s a good reason for it: it pays the bills. Should there be a problem with that? I’ve built a few widgets myself that aren’t commission based, a couple of personalised feed readers, a dictionary searching gadget, and some others - and I actually like making them, knowing that they are actually of some use to some people. Whenever we decide to build a widget, we at least tend to try and be original about it, or squeeze in a lot of features that other widgets don’t include.

I think the main problem with widgets is, as you say, a lot of the developers don’t have enough ambition to take their ideas further and integrate clever features, or some are just stupid search boxes that open a website with an affiliate link and do nothing else. Some of our earlier widgets did that and to be honest, I’m not really proud of them so I don’t mention them as much
But if you have so much ambition, what are you complaining about? If you can see a bigger potential in widgets than most other developers, surely you could come up with something much more interesting than a blog post complaining about it? Maybe you just prefer to do everything the hard/long way around. I, for one, would love to know what your idea of a perfect widget would be.

Have you ever posted a comment and later thought you were being a bit too harsh? That’s what I did with the comment on Venture Hacks. I really like the blog and had been reading it for awhile and I don’t think the writers are sexist.

As a female developer I sort of feel like the little things add up. It’s like someone is poking you and finally you turn around and shout, “Stop it!” Then you feel bad for yelling. I’m not going to say being a female developer is easier or harder though because it’s awfully tough to measure.