Schmedley: Widgets in One Place

I first became enamored with widgets back when Yahoo! was buying Konfabulator. Then I got into iGoogle and had quite the customized page going until my news feeds got too big for it. Now I have a Mac, and there are widgets designed for Dashboard for just about everything. But eventually, you get sick of downloading everything to your machine and then getting rid of it later if you find you don't need it. And while there are tons of widgets for services like Facebook, I have ditched my lemming status and not really jumped on the Facebook bandwagon. For people like me, there's a web widget platform, and it's name is Schmedley.

Schmedley calls their widgets "schmidgets" and the site works via channels. The combination of channels and schmidgets allows you to complete a myriad of everyday tasks all in one place: check stocks, read RSS feeds, shop on Amazon, create sticky notes, make travel plans, manage your calendar, send text messages, IM, etc. It really is a one-stop shop for most common tasks, and has a very attractive interface. Much more attractive, in fact, than iGoogle, which was my previous widget-y playground.

The only problem with Schmedley is that it is, essentially, widgets that just co-locate all your mundane tasks. If you like having everything in one place and looking pretty, then this is the place to do it. However, it's only a front-end to those same services, and we all know how little people like to give up tried-and-true apps and services, especially when they end up in the scaled-down schmidget or channel version.

Even keeping in mind that this is an alpha version, the functionality is very simple, almost too simple in many cases. For instance, with the SMS channel, the address book functionality isn't enabled yet, and all that's there is a simple "send" feature. In contrast, an inexpensive app called BluePhoneElite lets me manage all my SMS needs, including sending, receiving, stopping iTunes when calls come in, and a host of other features. It also won't let you access any information you can't already access, since it's merely an interface. If you can't already access IMs and web sites through whatever nanny-esque firewall you may be behind, Schmedley isn't going to help you do it (and thanks to friends who tried!).

At least in its alpha release, Schmedley appeals to those who like things organized and minimalist. Without some more robust interfaces, however, it's not going to attract a larger audience of the more tech-savvy.