Yahoo! Buys Konfabulator, a Combination That Makes Sense - Yahoo is Ready for a Little Competition
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The deal definitely puts Yahoo! ahead of the competition so far. It is expected to be more than a year before Microsoft will have a competing product, available in the next version of Windows. Even when that is released, Dashboard and Microsoft’s Sidebar require operating system upgrades; they are novelties added to feature lists at this point. They help sell operating systems and are not freely available for download and use. When most people have these installed on their systems already, then they’ll provide a lot of conflict for the Yahoo-bulator. But not yet.
Dashboard does have many fans already, but it is still fairly new to the Apple community. Not all OS X users have the new Tiger version of the operating system, the only one that includes Dashboard. The only ones who have Tiger are those who bought a brand new Mac since May and the techies who bought an upgrade package. Many Macs are even too old to run the newest OS X, and they continue using old OS X and OS 9. Plenty of Apple boxes out there could use a widget tool like Konfabulator, and those who have Tiger may appreciate having the choice between the two.
At the moment, Yahoo! is primarily competing with Google’s APIs (GAPIs). But still as a beta service, GAPIs is not a finished or stable product. It hasn’t really taken off yet either, though that’s probably just a matter of time. Konfabulator’s existing library of widgets give it an advantage until programmers start picking up on GAPIs.
The two companies do take somewhat different approaches, which is definitely good. The Konfabulator service seems more specialized to do exactly what I’ve been describing; it is a background program that runs little applets which constantly update information on your desktop. GAPIs provides Google search resources to programmers to integrate with programs.
Since Google lacks all those tons of web portal services that Yahoo! has, they had to use a different approach. Most of Google’s information is simply pruned from other sources. Google’s real focus is on expanding the technology and use of search data collection. So, the GAPIs are search oriented and try to bring the flexibility of search to other programs. They allow programs to use Google’s search and search services, like spelling and definitions.
One other difference is that Konfabulator uses JavaScript and XML to deliver widgets, but Google APIs allow programmers to use different languages suited for the task: Java, Perl, or VB.NET.
The newest dealings of these companies definitely show some promise for content delivery. It will be very interesting to see how Yahoo! uses Konfabulator, and to see how GAPIs differentiate from these other widget tools. Rumors are circulating that the Microsoft tool will be impressive, but it looks to be a long way off. If Yahoo! keeps working on Konfabulator (unlike how their messenger and other services sometimes stagnate) it could prove to be fair competition.
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