More respect in '08?

This year social networks may see $1 billion in ad spend, but widget makers may miss out on the spoils.

There is currently no reliable way to see how many views widgets generate.

In 2007, widgets — which saw almost 586 million unique users in November 2007, according to Business Week — made $20 million in ad revenue, a thousandth of online ad spending as a whole.

But comScore has developed a new way to track widgets. Where it once tracked only Flash-based applications, comScore's new tool also generates numbers for Javascript-based widgets. An analytics deck for Google Gadgets is also on the assembly line.