Here is a quick roundup of a couple of recent interesting widget news and trends:

• Facebook Connect is Getting into the Widget Game
  The "first" Facebook Connect widget allows interested sites to add a simple comments box to their blog or webpage with a single line of code. Obviously the goal of this (and other such widgets) will be to help Facebook Connect (currently on over 6,000 sites) spread! Google, of course, has a similar service.
• Economy Gives Rise to Bad News Widget
  Layoff trackers like this one from startup Telonu are making a debut to bring the bad news to your desktop!
• Chumby Widgets Coming to HDTVs
  In my last news post I talked about Chumby, the company bring widgets to digital photo frames. Now Chumby as announced a partnership with Broadcom that will integrate its rich media internet platform onto system-on-a-chip (SoC) solutions that will eventually find their way into HDTVs, set-top-boxes and Blu-ray players. Looks like Yahoo TV Widgets and Intel have some competition.
• Widget Marketing to Widget Productivity
  Widgetbox is bringing its widgets to the Confluence project management/collaboration platform in an effort to improve productivity on the platform. Productivity boosting widgets are not a new thing! Most of these widgets, however, have made more sense on the user's desktop, but bringing web-based widgets into portals, dashboards and collaboration platforms that business users spend time on is definately a set in the right direction.