It may be possible for developers to create custom widgets to contain within the iOS 5 notification center, assuming Apple allows it. This was demonstrated by a very simple proof of concept that is shown above. 9to5mac quotes @chronic, the jailbreak developer, describing how this is accomplished:

all a developer needs to do is create a “custom view interface” and “compile it is a bulletinboard plugin.” Bulletinboard is Apple’s internal codename for the iOS 5 Notification Center.

Allowing third party developers to create widgets for the iOS 5 Notification Center would certainly be a nice addition. In the current iOS 5 beta, the only two widgets are weather and a stock ticker which you can see in the screen capture below, but there is certainly interest in having more.

What if you could have an RSS or Twitter feed in Notification Center? What if the world of Mac Dashboard widgets was transferable to iOS devices? I think many of them would be more useful and better suited in iOS than Mac OS X really, so let’s hope it happens.

One things for sure though, if Apple doesn’t allow third party widgets, you can bet the jailbreak scene will handle it. Considering a jailbreak for iOS 5b1 is already out, it might not be long before this happens. You can poke around in the source code of the sample widget on GitHub to get a look at how this works.

You can watch Notification Center in action and more in these videos of iOS 5 features.