Yahoo has turned its Go mobile application into a widget platform, the company’s VP of Connected Life, Marco Boerries, announced today at CES. The Yahoo Go application has been revamped, and version 3.0, which will be released in beta later Monday, features a new carousel-based UI. But more important is the ability for users to add new widgets to the Go application, and the developer platform that powers them.
Third-party publishers can now build widgets for their content and services that can run inside Go, using an XML-based language called Blueprint. But in addition to running in Go, the widgets will also work over the mobile web. This means that developers can create a single widget with Blueprint, and it’s available not just to users of Go-compatible handsets, but to any mobile device with an HTML or XHTML browser.
Yahoo has established initial partnerships with Viacom/MTV, MySpace and eBay, and widgets from them will be available at launch, but any publisher can develop their own widget and make it available both on Go and on the Yahoo mobile web site. The beta of the new version of Go will initially run on 30 handset models; eventually it will be compatible with the more than 300 devices that can run Yahoo Go 2.0. Adding the mobile web functionality opens the addressable market up to many more devices and hundreds of millions more users. At first glance, it’s easy to dismiss this development as yet another mobile widget platform. However, the wide range of compatible devices, as well as the ability to run a single widget both inside Go and on the mobile web does provide a significant point of differentiation from other mobile widget platforms.
Another significant feature of the new platform is that it’s not only open to content providers, but also to advertisers. Instead of displaying simple graphical banner ads, advertisers can use Blueprint and the developer platform to essentially create their own widgets that offer a much richer experience to consumers. Yahoo’s demo showed one for a demo company; when the company’s ad was clicked on in Go, it opened up a widget with different features, including the ability to access a map showing nearby stores with the company’s jeans in stock. “On the one side, we have really rich consumer services,” Boerries said. “Then developers, publishers and advertisers have tools to create rich user experiences and monetize them.”
Embedding widgets in handsets: Yahoo already has deals in place with a number of handset vendors to embed the Go application in their devices, and Boerries said it’s working with LG, Motorola and Access to embed the ability to run the new widgets on their handsets, though it wasn’t clear if this will be some native widget environment, or if they’ll simply have the Go app pre-loaded.
New-look Yahoo Mobile site: Yahoo has also revamped its mobile site, letting users put more information on their personalized page by way of “Snippets.” This brings a My Yahoo-style experience to the mobile site, displaying previews of internet information on their Yahoo mobile page. Users can add RSS feeds, information from their My Yahoo web page, and other third-party snippets as well. The mobile site grabs a lot of context from a user’s My Yahoo page; for instance, if a user goes to add sports scores to their mobile page, the teams they follow in My Yahoo are listed first, and they can then search for other teams.
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