Yahoo Buys Up Konfabulator

[jedipi 0]

have you guy know that??

Yahoo Inc. has acquired Konfabulator, the software maker who created widgets -- mini applications which monitor weather, sports, news and more -- for the Macintosh in 2003.
Yahoo confirmed the purchase was finalized late last week for an undisclosed price. A Yahoo spokesman confirmed to The Mac Observer early Monday it will continue to develop widgets for the Mac platform.

Source: https://www.macobserver.com/article/2005/07/25.2.shtml

Here is the widget Yahoo.
http://yahoo.com/

I think this is good news.
and I guest the next version of Yahoo messenger may release as widgets. hum... interesting..
Lets think about it, if all Yahoo services have their own Widgets, what will they look like!!??

[Brian1405241474 0]

Yes, I heard about the sale the day the news hit online. It must have be great to have your small company recognized and bought by such a large company as Yahoo. When any small company finds their name linked with someone as huge as Yahoo, it is a big deal in the business world.

In fact, I did some searching and found that Konfabulator is free without the reminder windows that pop up asking you to register. That is a nice bonus, isn't it? Don't forget to download the latest version 2.1 which is about 5.2 mgs worth.

Go to Konfabulator and read the new information they have posted about the sale and the future. They are more than excited and I don't blame them. I'll be keeping my eye on them to see what changes happen.

According to this article in MacWorld, Yahoo is interested in macs. If anyone wants to peak my interest in a company, tell me they are interessted in my favorite computer. This is good news.

I already make my own widgets. Life is getting better all the time.

[optykal 0]

Hey this Konfabulator proggy is pretty cool. One thing I have to point out for people using WindowsXP/2k. The download is actually approx. 9.0meg (its only the mac version that is 5.2meg).

Some of the widgets can be quite useful, and then some of them are just plain wierd:

Mosquito Jim Bloom
A little Widget that displays the mosquito conditions within your zip code for today and tomorrow.

Just enter your zip code using the Preferences, and hope for the best.

Im not too sure about that one? It still got a four star rating... so who knows? hehe.

For anyone out there who hasn't used or even heard of this program, have a look at it. You may be suprised at just how nifty this thing can be. I use it mainly for RSS feeds and for random other things.

You may find that, a lot of the preinstalled things you will have no use for. For instance, I have no need for a battery status monitor on my screen while my laptop is plugged into a power supply 24/7. But if you head over to the widgets section of the site, there are a lot of widgets (about 650) that you can pick and choose from.

And as always, free stuff is (generally) good stuff, especially when its free of ads and spyware!

[cyborgxxi 0]

Personally, I think there will be a tab somewhere. I really like MSN Messenger but the Yahoo Messenger would look very neat if it looked stylish rather than of substance.I hope they would put that into Yahoo Messenger soon.By the way, Yahoo! needs to invent something soon because Microsoft and many other companies are getting big. Yahoo! doesn't really need to buy... do they?

[chiiyo 0]

When I heard Konfabulator would be free I popped over to take a look. Actually spent around an hour searching and filtering through all the widgets for Konfabulator.

My verdict? In the end, Dashboard provides me with all the widgets I need. Especially with MultiDash providing me with multiple Dashboards (btw that is one heck of a widget) I really don't need Konfabulator around.

But I can see how this would make Dashboards appear around the Windows land. Good news for Windows users I suppose? And good news for the Konfab people. Whether Apple likes it or meant it or not, Dashboard did hit Konfab pretty hard, so Konfab people are pretty lucky for Yahoo to come and buy over them.

[solankyno1 0]

I think it is good that Yahoo has purchased KOnfabulator. Now more people will know about its widgets. I think now we can have same type of widgets from Google or Microsoft because these three companies always compete with each other like just after Google Earch, Microsoft had launched Virtual Earth.

[optykal 0]

Yeah well, I have to say that at first I liked using Konfabulator. It has a lot of freely downloadable widgets, but now I'm not really all that keen on it. The only reason that I was using Konfabulator was for the rss feeds and i had a few other things going just for the hell of it. I have since switched over to using the FireFox add-in 'Sage' to handle all my rss feeds, and it does a fairly decent job at it. Because I no longer use the rss feeds, I really found that I didn't need Konfabulator on my system at all. Don't get me wrong, there are a lot of cool little widgets designed for it, and quite of few of them look really nice. Its just not the kind of thing that I need to be using!

[kaputnik 0]

Hummm... Widgets sound really quite interesting... its bound to be useful having a program hanging out on your desktop telling what the weather is going to be like when you've a happy... all by yourself picnic planned out.. On a more serious note.. there's other possibilities that widgets may have in the future... plugged in, in a p2p format, it could enable updating of any sort of information across the globe in real time... imagine for a minute that you're logged online and you need to find out the current rate of lentils (don't quite know for what) in Jakartha in Indonesia. Now if widgets were to get plugged into your Yahoo Messenger or into a p2p software, all you would have to do is type out a query and select a region, where you want the information from, and anyone participating in widgets in their messenger or other p2p software would be handed the query; and you'd be instantly connected (quite annonomously) with someone who may be able to provide you with information about lentils through widgets... and the lentils information would become available 'under a defined lable' in the widgets.... the enormity of it all is that compared to static information that may be minutes, hours or days old, information through widgets, could be instant, and live.. the only drawback is that there may be a lot of false information that may have to be weeded through... although this could be overcome by some sort of grading of information by local peers... for instance... if someone from Jakartha posted the price of lentils as $20 a kilo, and the real price is $1.2, then local peers could also post alternative prises (more correct) while ranking each other's prices.. so the price with the best rank would most likely be the most relavant informations.... Tremendous potential...