You’ll find them anywhere and you could be using one without even realising it.

All they essentially are: an icon or graphical interface that can be manipulated by a computer or a web user to perform a particular action. A good example are the icons you have got on your personal desktop. These as a rule are widgets.

Others include buttons, drop-down menus, media player buttons, web browser controls, email function controls, RSS feed icons and any interactive graphs or charts.

What are their purpose?

This can depend on the company and the widget itself, but most of the time online marketing companies set up these widgets so that they are reactive to mouse movements, mouse clicks and computer commands.

All in all they are designed to make the internet easier and more functional, and with web 2.0 formats taking more precent in the making of new websites, these little gismos are growing in popularity.