North Americans lead the world in Web widget usage, according to comScore data.
Widgets are used to display customized or personalized content on a Website for things like photo sharing or music recommendations, and are commonly found on blogs, social networking sites and other personalized pages.
Four in 10 North American Internet users visited Websites with embedded widgets in April 2007. Eastern Europeans had comparative widget disdain, with only 7.6% of Internet users in the region using the tools.
The most-used widgets worldwide were mainly photo-related. Slide was the top widget provider, with a worldwide reach of more than 117 million unique viewers, or 13.8% of the total worldwide Internet audience.
The use of widgets on photo-sharing Websites is not surprising, since such sites are a vibrant and growing sector of the user-generated economy.
The number of US Internet users who posted photos online more than doubled between 2003 and 2006, according to the USC Annenberg School Center for the Digital Future's "2007 Digital Future Project," published in November 2006.
comScore noted that Facebook's overtures to third-party widget developers would likely spur activity in the sector as well.
Learn where all those photos are being posted online. Read the eMarketer User-Generated Content: Will Web 2.0 Pay Its Way? report.