RescueTime will never be a purveyor of widgets (as a primary business), but there’s no denying that widgets are a damn good way to spread the word about your product, assuming that anyone actually wants to install them.

A widget that displays exactly how you spend your computer time may be creepy to some. As an old skool fella who is a bit more privacy-focused, I never really thought that a widget belonged anywhere on our near-term product roadmap. However, when we did our “What features do you want?” survey, thousands of people filled it out… 26% of ‘em expressed interest in a widget.

Sooooo, we built widgets. You can see mine to the right hand side of this blog– it’s a real time report of exactly what categories of my computer time I’m spending the most time on.

As we started thinking about it, RescueTime widgets could be used for all sorts of fun stuff:

• Lifestreaming. Just a fun little way to tell the world how you spend your time.
• Life hacking. We all know that discipline is hard. As Paul Graham says, there is nothing more motivating than the fear of public failure and ridicule. If your productivity data is available for all to see, do you think you’ll be a touch more productive?
• Workstreaming. Want to telecommute? Whip up a page for your boss with a few of your RescueTime graphs up there so he can feel “in touch”. For extra credit, you could throw a few static graphs ABOVE your real-time graphs, giving your boss graphs showing your pre-telecommute productivity.
• Create your own Dashboard! RescueTime has a handy Dashboard, but maybe you care about other graphs that require a few clicks. You could whip up your own “dashboard” (on a private page or intranet, maybe) that shows exactly what you want to see. Right now we really only offer two graph types (top apps/sites and top tags– or labels), but very soon any graph will be embeddable.
• Speaking of Intranets… You could drop a few graphs there to show what you’re up to. This will really start to sing when we introduce our groups functionality (allowing aggregation of multiple people into one graph).

Widgets are officially a beta product– we’ve got a few kinks to work out. For example, in Firefox there is a Flash bug that results in the status bar continuing to report “transferring data from RescueTime.com…” even though it’s not (you can switch to a different tab and back to make the message go away). Anyone know how to fix this?