Raw

Another now-obvious idea, not exactly a new concept but fairly well honed by Microsoft. As Dare puts it:

If you see a cool gadget on someone's space that you'd like to add to your space or portal page, all you need to do is click the '+' in the top-right corner of the gadget as shown in the screenshot below and viola

- a bassy violin appears on your own space. Great trick, but the big drawback is being tied to a particular environment, Windows Live Spaces in this case. Not altogether web-friendly.

I've seen quite a few portal/service kind of sites that offer a customisable chunk of HTML you can paste into your own site, e.g. the Flickr " badge" and Google's custom search box. But the distribution point from these is generally centralised. Far better to have something that provides the add-to-my-site facility with every local deployment.

Ideally this would be a single-click affair. I've lost track if the Atom protocol has any coverage for specific aspects of a site, but it certainly seems feasible to have a sidebar section defined as a series of potentially postable entries, those entries potentially having some kind of dynamic content. The "get gadget" link would fire a script to pass across the gadget code.

Another approach (which might use the APP) would be through Live/ Web Clipboard - copy the gadget from another page to your own. 

The low budget way is the traditional HTML copy and paste, but even that might be semi-automated with a bit of script.

Where the gadget depends on some central service (which would probably be majority of cases), an aim that favoured viral distribution would be for the end user to collect and deploy the gadget themselves with minimal interaction with the central service, i.e. transparent from deployment siteA to siteB.

But what constitutes a gadget is another question altogether... 

 

@en