A Canadian expert in Web 2.0 technology recently said that MMORPGs can be of use for business collaboration because of the special characterisitics of widgets, according to ITbusiness.ca.

Deepak Ramachandran, vice-president, Enterprise 2.0 research program, at New Paradigm, a Toronto-based think tank, noted that it is how widgets are created and used that makes them an attractive business tool.

Any somewhat advanced player of an MMORPG runs any number of widget on the screen at one time. Sometimes, the game becomes more about the widgets than about the actual game itself. And this, says Ramachandran, is the point.

“One popular widget tells you which of the people in your guild is under the most threat,” he said about the World of Witchcraft widets. “This technology doesn’t exist in $200 billion enterprises – but it exists in this game.”

“How many corporations do we see doing that?”

In his talk, Ramachandran also spoke of different ways that businesses can harness the special powers of Web 2.0, speaking of the Net Generation, Sermo, and how social networks can show businesses how to foster meaningful relationships between stakeholders.

In Second Life, our widget equivalent might be the HUD. Which reminds me of a nursing HUD put together and demo’d at the recent Games for Health Conference in Baltimore (video below). HUDs for training, collaboration, building, socializing, and animation – Deepak isn’t far off in saying that widgets are the future, but he’s missing the fact that they’ve already arrived as tools for collaboration.