I am personally quite excited about the future of embeddable widgets, and have blogged about it on various occasions at http://aaronwinborn.com/. As stated in Chapter 11, I believe that as the Embed Widgets module matures, it will transform how Drupal integrates with the rest of the Internet.

We are already seeing a push towards distributed data, as seen with sites such as Flickr, YouTube, and Google Docs. I believe that is just the tip of the iceberg.

At Advomatic over the past year, I have already seen an increase of clients requesting embeddable widgets, and have implemented a number of them myself. Each has been custom crafted, a process that will become significantly easier in the near future.

This will just continue to escalate. Widgets are becoming increasingly in demand on the Internet in general, and Drupal is rising to the challenge. Widgets themselves are beginning to be seen as mini-sites, no longer tied to a page or a site or even a URL.

A site that is able to...