Widgets, or shortcut links downloaded to computer desktops, are gaining so much popularity that corporations are using them as a marketing tool.

"The user’s desktop is extremely valuable, it’s prime real estate," said Paul Brody, Yahoo vice president of desktop products, in Sunnyvale, California.

Desktop widgets, also known as gadgets or modules, serve as short cuts to other Web sites. They are becoming very diverse, represented by pictures, logos and or even interactive games. Yahoo recently launched Widgets 4 and has more than 4,300 widgets, many written by third parties but that include company-branded ones. "If you have that application running there (on the desktop) all the time, from an advertiser and a brand’s perspective, that’s obviously an opportunity to connect with their key audiences," said Brody.

Wigets allow the user to access information by desktop without opening a web browser. "It’s the slicker, richer version of bookmarks on your web browser," said Dave Carnoy, executive editor for CNET.com, in New York. "There seems to be a widget for just about everything."

Popular widgets include weather trackers and UV indexes, news feeds, train, bus and flight schedules, currencies and even lunar phases. Women can track their menstrual cycles or count down to their due date if pregnant. A widget coffee alarm will sound when it is time for a break and an alcohol calculator widget allows brewers to determine the alcohol content. "You really can only have so many of them before it starts either cluttering up your desktop or slowing down the load-time," Carnoy said. "It’s a little bit of a fad."

Whether widgets are time-wasters or have the potential to be exploited by advertisers, one analyst says people like them for their cool factor. "It allows you to keep your fingers in all the digital pies that make up your life," said Dr. Curtis Gittens, senior research analyst for Info-Tech Research Group, a Canadian IT market research company based in London, Ontario. "But it won’t help you solve the whole information overload problem," Gittens said. "It could become as messy as your bookmarks." Gittens said users should download widgets from established sites. "Play safe, stick to the main players and you will have lots of fun with your widgets," he said.

What does all of this mean to online marketers?

We’ve been talking about the growth of portals and why portals for now  will continue to grow. Now let’s tie it into online marketing and what it means for us.

Does this growth in portals mean that other online initiatives will start eroding? I don’t believe so. While portals visits are growing in percentages, at the same time overall web usage is growing as well. So even if portal visitation grows to over 60 percent of web visits, if the overall pie is growing, the visits will be growing at other Web sites as well.

Another thing to consider is that portals are starting to slow in growth, and in most cases time spent on the portals. The exception is AOL which is unique because they’ve just seriously entered the field. Somebody just entering any field, if they’re successful, always will have higher percentages than their counterparts.

Now this should lead us to ask the question on whether the market is fragmenting and it gives niche-focused Web sites a truly significant advantage. The answer is yes. The market is still fragmenting, and niche sites are still the way to go.

That’s the reason I talked so much in the first few posts about portals, to show you what’s happening and why they’ll still be growing for some time to come. But for me, it only reinforces what I and others know about niches; portals or networks, or anything that will bring people together in a "mass" way, are always going to go the way of fragmentation. Even the social networking site MySpace is starting to find this out. They are still growing to for the same reasons portals are, but even now the newer, niche-focused social sites are starting to proliferate online, and this is just the infant stages of that. I wouldn’t doubt if in the next couple of years it ends up being in the millions.

Why does this always happen? People always get specific, rather than general. A "mass" site or network, or whatever, can never appeal to people in their unique interests. Even take the crowd hanging out together on the street. Eventually the generalness of that grows old, and people start searching out those have similar interests. It’s the way that people simply are.

So what’s the answer to what it will the growth of portals, or anything else mean to online marketers? Overall absolutely nothing, or as we’ll talk about next post, they’re actually good for online business. But if you’re developing niche Web site or social sites etc., you’re on the right track. No matter how much people like to talk about that which is big, people will truly interact with that which is specifically targeted to their interests, much more than they will to that which just skims the surface.

Know More: Portals New AOL, Online Advertising, Online Marketing, Portals Google, Portals Internet Advertising, Portals Internet Marketing, Portals Microsoft, Yahoo