Yahoo! announces a mobile widgets framework
Yahoo! 3.0 screenshot
Yeah, the new day job + contracting for the old job combo is kicking my bootay. That explains why I missed this big announcement made yesterday by Yahoo! at the 2008 Consumer Electronics Show.
Too lazy to click / comb through the knee-deep pile of PRbullshit-speak? Here it is: Yahoo! will soon release a widgets platform for mobile phones. It will tie in to the new Yahoo! Go 3.0 product available for Java-enabled smart phones, and allow anyone to create widgets (and / or ’snippets‘) for mobile phones that have Go installed.
And I should care, because …?
Yahoo is taking a major step forward in both the mobile and widgets spaces. Sure, Google has mobile applications. Yes, Microsoft has an entire mobile operating system. And it’s true that companies like Widsets have provided a mobile phone widget platform for a few years now. But Yahoo! is the first major search / content company to provide a track on which the mobile widget train can ride.*
How much more will this complicate my web development life?
Get ready to learn a new markup language, y’all. Although you can create smaller widgets — which Yahoo! calls snippets — with an RSS file and some configuration metadata, meatier applications will require the use of Blueprint, an XML variant based on XForms.
*Technically speaking, Macromedia (acquired by Adobe) was one of, if not the first company to embrace mobile widgets and provide a platform on which to develop and deliver them with its Flash Lite product.
