Yahoo has bought Konfabulator, which makes software that lets users run widgets — generally single-task-focused mini-applications that do a wide variety of things like check the weather or stock quotes, control other applications like music players or check Web sites for updates. Whether for Konfabulator or Apple’s Dashboard (which pretty much stole the Mac market out from underneath Konfabulator), developing widgets is based on common, open technologies and — to these untrained eyes, anyway — looks relatively easy. This makes it all very long tail, as there are widgets available for a number of esoteric things since anybody can make one.

The thing is, though, widgets, or something like them, are pretty perfect for mobile, too.

People use the net in a fundamentally different way on their mobile devices than when they’re behind a computer. While browsing on the PC may typically be just that, browsing, use of the net on mobile devices is overwhelmingly task-based: I want to find the football score, or the movie time, the address of that shop, and so on. Yahoo’s mobile services already reflect this, to some extent, its top menu organized around tasks like checking email, instant messaging, or getting directions. And so it’s not so hard to see widgets jumping to mobile now, either.

One of the great things about widgets (in Dashboard for me) is that for common tasks, they’re easily and essentially instantly available. I move my mouse to the bottom left corner, and my widgets pop up. Some simply push information to me: the weather, for instance, is always updated, so I can see the current information and forecast without having to go to a bookmarked Web page, and a package tracker keeps tabs on my latest Amazon purchase winging its way towards me. Others pull information from the Web, like the dictionary, Wikipedia or Google Maps widgets. Either way, they’re all very task-specific, and tend to do that task pretty well.

That sounds pretty perfect to me for mobile devices. In addition to a standard browser, have widgets to handle common tasks, particularly pull ones: instead of loading up a browser, connecting, surfing to a page you might have bookmarked, then entering your query, you just pull up the relevant widget and run your search. But it would make pull better, too, just like RSS could, by letting users define information they want to always have updated and available on their devices.

This kind of stuff shouldn’t replace a browser, but it should be offered in addition to it. Leave the browser and its open access intact for the times when it’s right — but make everyday task-based surfing simpler, faster and easier.