Todd Nestor

First of all, this plugin is for a WordPress Multisite setup. The user has the option to display thumbnails or not, and for how many posts they want to display.
This widget works differently than other widgets that display recent posts from an entire network. A network that has lots of blogs (like several hundred, or even several thousand) can take a long time to query each blog and compare the times for the most recent posts.
If you are using some sort of database sharding it will take even more time. This plugin works much more simply, as posts are published on the network they are pushed to a network option that contains an array of the most recent posts from the network.
At first this array will be empty, so it might be a bit until the widget has a full list (up to the maximum set by the user in the widget) of recent posts. Since we are adding posts to the list at the time of publishing this also makes it easy to push the thumbnail to it also, which is why this widget can show thumbnails when lots of other ones can’t.
In a future version we will allow the network admin to limit the people who can use this widget to super admin users. A future option will also allow network options for blogs to ignore (at a network level), blog owners will be able to opt out of having their blog’s posts included, or the network admin will be able to explicitly list blogs that get included.

Hercules Recent Posts from Network

Hercules Recent Posts from Network creates a widget that displays the recent posts from the entire network.

Hercules Post Stats adds a meta box to your post edit screen that shows you real time details about how many words you have written in the post, how many you wrote this session, how much time total you have spent on the post, how long you have spent this session, and approximately how long it would take the average reader to read the post.

Hercules Post Stats

Hercules Post Stats adds a meta box to your post edit screen that shows you real time stats about your post.

Hercules Recent Posts from Network vs Hercules Post Stats