The Playground

Google just recently launched another site called Google Gadgets. It's a collection of add-ons that you can use on your web pages to add dynamic content. You can add third-party applications from Google Maps to Picasa Web Photos, a simple calculator to jokes and games. This is part of the announcement from the Google Press Center:

With almost no effort and at no cost, webpage owners can add complex, dynamically updating content to their own websites using Google Gadgets. Because there is such an enormous variety of Google Gadgets to choose from, webmasters also have a great deal of freedom to select only the gadgets that will best complement their own page. There are games, news clips, weather reports, maps, and more.

There's over 1500 different gadgets, and creating a gadget is easy — anyone with even a little experience with web design or programming can do it. Here's a simple calculator, created with one line of code.