Yahoo! Buys Konfabulator, a Combination That Makes Sense - The Future Awesome-ness of Konfabulator
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Now it should be obvious why the deal looked so good to both companies. Yahoo! wanted a platform to tie its services to computer desktops to stay competitive. Since this program is already fairly matured (the oldest of its kind) and comes with a fairly large widget library and development base, it puts Yahoo! ahead of the competition. Also, Konfabulator probably wasn’t too expensive, with Dashboard available to a select group and with Google APIs and Windows Sidebar around the corner.
Konfabulator will see a vast improvement on its ability to “konfabulate” information. Instead of creatively scouring and stripping information from pages, Yahoo!’s wide array of web services will provide easy data to pull.
As Yahoo! tries to make all their applications more customizable and accessible using XML feeds, Konfabulator will be the tool to demonstrate and deliver Yahoo! services. The three employees of Konfabulator also sounded happy to keep their jobs; the small team will now be involved in widget development at Yahoo!. Their announcement showed a lot of excitement in the good coffee in Yahoo!’s break room.
Konfabulator widgets were already rather easy to make, basically being nothing more than a JavaScript and XML application. It should remain that way. However, Yahoo! services may become quite customizable. Besides making it easier for the widgets to harvest information, Yahoo! may make it easier to personalize the information they acquire. For example, take a news widget. From a Yahoo! account that lets you customize your data-feed preferences, you could customize Yahoo! to deliver you only news of given categories or about certain companies or people. Or maybe it could get specific enough that the widget would only provide news that matched your keyword criteria.
I’d really like to see customized services like this. Job hunters could download a HotJobs widget that displays the newest jobs that meet their personal criteria. Local search could be turned into a widget, one that remembers your location and caches all nearby maps and satellite images. Users could even send email from a widget without opening webmail in a browser. This is just a start.
Having a resident Yahoo! application could also improve basic search. It’s probably not beyond their imagination to design a widget that can analyze open documents to help see what you are searching for. Say a 10th grader is writing a report on the industrial revolution and has little more than an introduction written. The student enters “Industrial revolution” into the advanced search widget, and it lifts the text in the open report document and other open browser windows and PDFs (maybe even the kid’s chat window where he’s complaining about class) and uses those content to provide secondard keywords and semantics. The idea would push ahead semantic searching and targeted results, yet would need to work out harvesting information from only relevant windows.
Next: Yahoo is Ready for a Little Competition >>
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