layout: post title: Battle of the widget platforms created: 1122278659 categories:

• Web 2.0
• Wireless, Cellular, and Mobile

Verrrry interesting. Another scoop from Om about the next Yahoo acquisition:

Yahoo has bought, Pixoria, the company behind Konfabulator, the widget application. Widgets are small web-apps that run on your desktop and retrieve information from the Internet.

Om Malik on Broadband: Yahoo buys Konfabulator

I've been thinking about how to extend the web to the desktop for a while now. I've been following Apple's Dashboard stuff with interest, especially since both Nokia and Sony have made recent announcements about using the KHTML codebase for mobile browsers. This is close enough to Apple's work that having this as a platform to write applications for mobile phones and other platforms is not unthinkable...and as Roland has been complaining about J2ME, mobile phones desperately need a platform.

But...I'm not convinced about widgets, since they're not particularly mainstream enough. I think real end users want stuff that feels like apps. Obviously they have to (from the dev point of view) have an easy platform to build to. I'm still feeling bullish on cross-platform desktop Flash apps.