I loved the idea of gadgets when Google announced them for Gmail. They’re basically widgets that you can put in the sidebar with various other information. For example, you can put a Google Calendar gadget in your sidebar so you can see your upcoming appointments when reading email. The idea of being able to put more information in Gmail’s sidebar seemed like a great one until I realized there’s not much else that actually belongs in the sidebar of my email. This is made obvious by Google’s latest blog post focusing on the gadgets feature in Gmail, which includes dubious gadgets like a bit.ly URL shortener, a currency converter, and even a Chuck Norris fact generator. None of these things belong in an email client, and the Chuck Norris one is just ridiculous.