TechCrunch has posted about something on the Yahoo Widgets blog “where they talk about the pros and cons of the four major desktop widget platforms offered by Yahoo, Microsoft, Google and Apple”.

Widgets can certainly add a degree of functionality to an otherwise pretty functionless space, which is nice. And also, they sure look cool.

Part of the growing problem with widgets (or ‘Gadgets’, as Microsoft likes to call them in Vista) will surely be exchanging information across different widget-makers’ widgets.

It seems that any technology that becomes sufficiently popular runs into this problem — the more disparate solutions that arise, the harder it is to get them to work together.

While it seems that all of Yahoo’s widgets actually work on Vista, it still doesn’t help with getting information that is held in one application, widget or platform into another.

Calendaring is always particularly complicated.

I want a desktop calendar widget that will show me my calendar on my home desktop, show on the web when I’m not at home, show on my desktop at work, and it must also play nice with my Lotus Notes calendar (where most of my calendar entries live).

I originally tried to get the Google Calendar to accept my Lotus Notes entries so I could view it at work — with no luck (if anyone else has figured this out, I’m very impressed). Instead, I just send the entries to my Nokia 6265i through Bluetooth. But it would be nice to have something at home.

I’d also like to see widgets that allowed people to collaborate using the same web-enabled widget in real time — while I haven’t seen this yet, it certainly doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. If anyone knows of anything like this, please let me know.