I'm positively giddy this morning. And I think the rest of San Francisco is too. When I first moved back to the Bay Area in 2002, you couldn't imagine a more depressing place. The great steel and glass canyon that is Market Street was practically silenced as post-bubble workers shuffled sadly to the jobs they clung to desparately. But there's a new sound on the streets these days - the sound of corporate credit cards flying out of wallets to buy nice lunches! The bubble is back! And it's fueled by widgets.

Hopefully it's not a real bubble, but there is a lot of enthusiasm in technology again. And I'm glad I don't have to feel like working with tech is a dirty profession anymore.

So what's this widget talk all about? "Widget" is that word you use for a thing when you can't remember the actual name of the thing you're talking about. Most commonly used in the business world to describe a commodity item. As in, "If Dell sells 1,000 more widgets a week than Gateway in Q3, they're gonna kill!" (Coincidentally, Widgets were also a race of super-midgets in the He-Man cartoon series. Yeah, I watched it after school as a latch key kid.)

So it's appropriate that in the tech world, a widget is pretty darn undescribable. According to Wikipedia, "A widget (or control) is an interface component that a computer user interacts with, such as a window or a text box." Like that dialog box that pops up when you want to print something.

But in web 2.0, to paraphrase Shakespeare, "The Widget's the Thing." More than a dialogue box, the widget is the whole application. And generally, what it does is grab information, graphics, etc. from one site (or multiple sites) and display them on your site. These mini-applications usually don't require any additional software and their code can be embedded right into any of your web pages. I grabbed a few of my favorites and posted them on the N-TEN site.

So, there are dozens of new companies cropping up right now whose only product is a widget. It may be a bubble, but it may be more. Because here's the cool thing. The lasting legacy of the Open Source Movement is in the open API's and community driven content we see everywhere today. And these widgets capitalize on both. So as long as the trend towards increasd openness continues, we should see a lot more of these.

Oh - and if you're interested in all things widget, a great blog is Widgetoko.