Gadget or Widget? It's the progammable Web

Jeff Huber, senior vice president of engineering at Google, gave a brief presentation at the Web 2.0 Summit on what he called the programmable Web, referring mostly to gadgets.

"What RSS did for content, gadgets are doing for applications," he said.

Huber's talk followed Niall Kennedy's thorough overview on the widget ecosystem (gadget in Google parlance) where applications are disaggregated, with widgets living in the cloud and embeddable and portable across the Web and even desktop.

Since January, Google's platform has spawned 20,000 gadgets used across 100,000 Web sites. It's the power of an open developer platform and distribution system, Huber said The top applications have more than tens of million of users, and over 60 applications have more than million weekly active users. Fifty percent of the traffic is outside of the top 125 gadgets, Huber said.

"We think this is quite significant. Applications are fundamentally changing from monolithic sites to smaller feeds and containers and the open distribution channel. Enterprises are starting to take notice with IBM, BEA and Sun."

What company will become the dominant platform? It's the wrong question.

"The Internet has already won. The Web is the platform--a mosaic of gadgets, APIs and container all over the Web."

If you are Yahoo or a host of other companies, you can substitute the world widget for gadget. The Web may be the platform but not everyone agrees on what to call the things that are proliferating rapidly across the Internet.