Yahoo! Tries To Catch Widget Wave - Forbes
In a tech era dominated by Google, Facebook and countless hyped start-ups, one way beleaguered Yahoo! plans to stay relevant is by riding the Web widget wave.
Yahoo! (nasdaq: YHOO - news - people ) has been in the desktop widget business since it acquired tiny application platform-maker Konfabulator in July 2005. But since that time, widgets (small add-on applications) have moved online and gained plenty of buzz through their use on social networks and cultivation by Facebook, MySpace and most recently, Google (nasdaq: GOOG - news - people )’s OpenSocial standardized Web application platform. Nearly half of all U.S. Internet visitors in June 2007 used a Web widget, according to comScore.
But don’t forget about the desktop. Yahoo! hasn’t.
On Thursday, Yahoo plans to announce that it is revamping its desktop-tethered Yahoo! Widgets platform so that trendy developer firms that build widgets for popular consumer brands will have an easy way to make their existing widgets compatible with the Yahoo! platform. For instance, Yahoo! widgets used to be created only in Javascript. Now, they will also include programming languages such as HTML and Adobe (nasdaq: ADBE - news - people )’s Flash to enable Web tricks like streaming video.
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