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I'm actually surprised LinkedIn's widget doesn't say "X people viewed your profile in the past Y days" while constantly modifying Y so X can change without actually changing... since that's one of the many shitty attention whore things they do with email alerts.
Wouldn't X change daily if Y is static?
You don't want X to be 0, so Y needs to change as well to keep people clicking.
If people are clicking your profile at least daily, yes. If you're not particularly "engaged" on Linkedin (I have an account but virtually never use it or update it) then not so much. It is the unengaged ones LinkedIn is targetting with this (because the engaged ones don't need to be tricked into going to the site).

As guptaneil said you don't want X to be 0. Also, by playing with Y even when X wouldn't be 0 you can trick people into thinking there is activity that doesn't exist:

Spam Email Day1: "3 people clicked your profile in the past 5 days!"

Spam Email Day2: "10 people clicked your profile in the past 15 days!"

Meanwhile there's been no change, 10 people have clicked your profile in the past 15 days and 3 people have clicked in the past 6 days, but the 10 number looks bigger thus maybe you'll click to see why the sudden uptick.

It does and it shows the profile pictures normally. Not sure why its not showing up for him.
Dropbox's widget is also fairly unnecessary — it just gives you a list of recently modified files.
I can see how that may be useful, if I'm using shared folders.
Fair enough, but it seems limited even then given the visual space allotted to widgets (though I suppose that hardly Dropbox's fault).
Excuse me for being rude but what makes these worse than the iOS 7 notifications? If you actually take 2 factor seriously the notification screen is worthless.
They aren't notifications. They're persistent panels in the "today" view, and none of them offer much justification for taking up that space.
Well since they're not enabled by default I don't think there is anything to worry really
I've never seen an Android widget that I felt justified its existence, and I'm thinking the same will be true for iOS.
ESPN Scorecenter, weather, BBC News, and the music player are four I can think of from my own experience.
Is there shittytumblrblogs.tumblr.com yet?
So it's no different than Android?! I was about to buy iPhone 6 :(
Am I the only one who doesn't really consider iOS's widgets to be actual widgets? At least on Android I can "do" something with the widget. Example: GMail or email widget....I can read through my inbox; calendar...I can see my next events. The iOS widgets just create a shortcut for me to need to open the full app.
The extensions could be written to be full featured. It's really the fault of the individual products not doing anything interesting with it.
To be fair to Duolingo, if you enable daily goals then your remaining points for the day are shown. Not spectacularly useful perhaps, but not comically useless either.
Evernote's is actually pretty good. A simple accelerator for adding things to Evernote.
The TwoDots one is pretty useless too. Displays only which level you're currently on