In this post, Brian Braiker of Newsweek discusses the massive impact that widgets will have in the coming year.

Millions of MySpace members dress up their pages with videos, music, photos and more. And the technology that makes it all possible is so easy to use that, like Stroupe, many MySpacers didn’t even know they were using it. But each movable part of Stroupe’s profile is there thanks to a widget. Get used to that word.... If 2006 was all about social networks, user-generated content and YouTube, then it’s a fair bet that 2007 will be about further personalizing life online. Already, portals like Google and Yahoo! offer customizable pages. Want to see a calendar, learn a new word-of-the-day and check local windsurfing conditions all from your homepage? No problem, you have thousands of widgets to choose from. And the fact that they’re so intuitive has made the features very popular. “The Google personal homepage is the fastest-growing Google product,” says Marissa Mayer, the company’s vice president of “search products and user experience.” “This market is going to be very large.”

Blogstar Om Malik and Niall Kennedy are mentioned for their great work on the Widgets Live conference. It still blows me away how a simple comment blew up into a full fledged conference now being discussed in mainstream media publications. This timing of this article was kind of neat given the discussion on David Beisel's blog, as well as on the post I made before the article was released entitled, "2007 Year of the Widget?." To review what happened in 2006, check out this post from my friend Ivan. With all the activity in the space, it looks like it will be a fun year... technorati tags: newsweek, widgets, predictions, 2007, niallkennedy, om, startpages