Why Yahoo Bought Konfabulator
Why Yahoo Bought Konfabulator: "Yahoo's recent purchase of Pixoria, developer of the quirky but seriously cool Konfabulator platform, has many pundits scratching their heads—what on earth would a web search company want with all of those software widgets?Pixoria describes Konfabulator product as "a JavaScript runtime engine for Windows and Mac OS X that lets you run little files called Widgets that can do pretty much whatever you want them to."...
Yahoo has been pushing forward on several fronts to ease access into the company's vast storehouses of content and services. For example, Yahoo APIs are available for developers to build their own Yahoo-centric search applications. Other APIs allow developers to build applications on top of Yahoo maps, music and Flickr services, and to integrate Yahoo content into web sites via RSS feeds.
Within days of acquiring Konfabulator, Yahoo had provided links within the Yahoo Developer Network directly to Konfabulator's developer documentation and forums.
Currently, developers can create Widgets that tap into just about any open data source on the Web. Rose is emphatic that Yahoo maintain this open access going forward. He also said that we'll soon be seeing a whole slew of Widgets that expose parts of the Yahoo network that are relatively hidden away....
According to Rose, Yahoo has dismissed the idea of delivering advertising via Widgets. While this is a laudable goal in the short run, allowing users to get comfortable using Widgets, there's nothing stopping third-party developers from inserting ads in the Widgets they create. And for many applications, Widgets provide a clear contextual framework that would be ideally suited to serving highly-targeted ads. So we'll see.
To me, Yahoo's acquisition of Konfabulator makes perfect sense, and between Yahoo's own engineers and everyone else who gets the urge to mess around creating Widgets, I think we're going to see an explosion of seriously cool new tools and gateways into Yahoo emerge during the next year.'"
posted by Jen @ 7:28 am
<< Home