I found this article at Sexywidget.com that discussed this list of 10 Sins of Widget Makers at Sniperoo.com.   Their list includes these among others:

1. Sorry, you can’t choose a colour.
2. We’re going to put our logo and our name in it. And also under it
3. Oh, we just can’t be bothered to let you resize it unless  you want to hack the code (YouTube)
4. Nope, you can’t change the heading.
5. Look, every part is necessary, you don’t get to pick and choose (MyBlogLog)
6. Look, the whole point is that we get to slap our huge logo on everyone else’s work (Google Web Gadgets)

I can understand most of the Sins, but some of them can be argued.  Choosing a color?  Sure, that’s easy.  But, putting a logo and name on it?  Why wouldn’t you?  Change the heading?

All in all I think they are good suggestions and I’ll definitely relay them to our design and development team.  As a relative newbie to the widget space I didn’t think of a lot of these points when embarking on our project.

And on Sexywidget.com they mention:

“I agree with most of them with the following caveats:

• Sometimes you have to get stuff out before it’s perfect
• Sometimes you have to have sacrifice functionality for simplicity”

I couldn’t agree more.  If you take a year to build out your product someone else is going to beat you to the punch…and in that same year they’ll probably release a V 1.2, etc.  A better option would be to build a slimmed down version for a phase 1 launch that still offers the core functionality and allows you to build a user base while you are working on phase 2 in the background.