Importance of Meta Description

[SCP]

I have heard the topic of meta information debated a number of times here on the forums and elsewhere. This video was just posted by Cutts on the importance of creating meaningful and unique meta descriptions on every page of your site. www(dot)youtube(dot)com/watch?v=HtSzi2MUegs

[Tim Shepard Destin]

How much has to be changed for a meta to be unique.

When you have many pages with similar widgets, its difficult for every description to be absolurely unique.

For example, would these both be considered unique:

Description 1: See various sizes of blue widgets here.
Description 2: See various sizes of yellow-green widgets here.

I'm not asking if these are quality descriptions, just if they would meet the definition of unique.

[SCP]

How much has to be changed for a meta to be unique.

When you have many pages with similar widgets, its difficult for every description to be absolurely unique.

For example, would these both be considered unique:

Description 1: See various sizes of blue widgets here.
Description 2: See various sizes of yellow-green widgets here.

I'm not asking if these are quality descriptions, just if they would meet the definition of unique.

What data are the widgets representing? What are some of your pages that have these widgets?

[Dallas Broker]

I'm not a SEO expert by any means but IMO you should place more emphasis on differentiating particular pages. ex. when listing pages for subdivisions...you might use the scenario you described above:
Description 1: See various sizes of blue widgets here.
Description 2: See various sizes of yellow-green widgets here.

Your main pages that focus on specific targeted niche should be much more descriptive and describe content down to the t... of course having said that if you can manually write every meta description specifically to page content - this would be best option

[CLTMichael]

Don't meta stuff, only use metas that describe the keyword you are going after. Make all the pages DB driven so you can do this automatically.