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Yahoo Purchases Konfabulator
NerdyPunk2ML writes "Macworld news has an
article
about Yahoo's acquisition of Konfabulator, which will be announced Monday. Yahoo company executives said they will be
giving Konfabulator away for free, completely doing away with the US$19.95
currently charged for the product. The reason they purchased
Konfabulator was they wanted an easy way to open up its APIs to the developer
community and allow them easy access to the information on the Yahoo web site." From the article: "The acquisition of Konfabulator may not be the last Mac compatible product users see from Yahoo! While Schneider wasn't specific, he did say that there was interest in the Mac. 'There is a move at Yahoo! -- in addition to Konfabulator -- to move more onto the Mac,' said Schneider. 'We want to make sure we find a way to be more cross platform.'"
I'm sure the fact that Konfabulator's 'buy out price' went WAY down after Tiger, and Dashboard, were released has NOTHING, no, NOTHING AT ALL to do with this sale :)
Konfabulator == widgets; desktop thingys made from *ml, javascript etc.
Apple later came up with Dashboard, created the mother of all smokescreens about Desktop Accessories to plead that it was not inspired by Konfabulator and the rest is history.
Apple's behaviour apparently wasn't breaking any law as such but it was the equivalent of some kid leaning over your shoulder and copying your homework. I expect the Dashboard apologists will appear shortly pointing to a piece of FUD called daringfireball, but the question remains:
would Dashboard have existed in the form it does, using the underlying technologies it does, trying to serve the purpose it does and look how it does if Konfabulator never had existed ?
answer: um...ah....oh
I say good luck to Konfabulator, hope they got a good price from Yahoo
They're definitely providing at least a couple of services which I'm surprised that Google isn't heavily involved in just yet.
One of them is YahooGroups, for running mailing lists (along with several additional group-like features latched on). I guess Yahoo picked up a lot of this market by default, especially after Listbot was shut down by Microsoft. The other is Yahoo Calendar, which I'm admittedly only just starting to play with, but I'm finding it useful.
The biggest reason that I'm surprised Google hasn't touched these areas is that they're both very search-oriented, or can be. Just about everything Google's done in the past has been based around some kind of searching, or generally helping people to find things. That's where Google's expertise is.
I've played around with it a bit. I have it on my laptop. The widgets are showing battery (much, much nicer than the stupid default windows one), wifi stength, disk usage, and weather.
Of these, only the weather one "could" be shown through a browser.
I have mine set to only be seen as part of the background, so none of the widgets are on top of any windows. But they are visible if all windows are minimized
My only complaint is the memory footprint (20MB just for the engine, plus 1-5MB per widget), and some widgets are CPU hogs, causing my battery to drain faster than usual (one of the battery monitors!) and cpu to stay hotter.
Don't steal. The government hates competition.
...because the widgets only update when the dashboard is visible.
I share your concern over the need for some widgets when web or utilities work fine. (Wikipedia widget, I'm looking in your direction!)
There's a dashboard widget called SysStat -- pretty much the same as 'top' or 'Activity Monitor' -- but unlike those, it only uses CPU when dashboard is showing. I use this thing an awful lot...
"On the flipside, if Dashboard's popularity made the Yahoo deal happen (which, come on, it probably did), then Konfabulator probably just made out better than they'd ever imagined"
Yup. sometime getting copied in the software business is a GOOD thing. I, for one, never heard of konfabulator untill apple announced dashboard.
It's not hard to see Yahoo dropping support for their Dashboard widgets now that they have Konfabulator. The question is which one will become the better?
Konfabulator will be free and cross platform. Dashboard is part of OSX. Running both just seems real redundant to me. Konfabulator may attract a much larger following of developers simply because it's available to Windows users, and the fact Yahoo's widgets will at some point only run on Konfabulator (not that someone else could probably come up with an unoffical one).
If a converstion tool is made to transfer Dashboard Widgets to Konfabulator Widgets, you may soon see people moving over to Konfabulator. Will the original third party product find itself overbearing the one in your system you can't remove (for Mac users)? Then again, Dashboard widgets run as separate processes (each one) so an empty dashboard prolly uses little if any system resources. It's also a possibility someone will write a converstion tool to move Konfabulator Widgets back to Dashboard.
It will be interesting to see how much malicious widgets become a problem on the Windows side once Konfabulator becomes free and adopted more widely.
I'll leave the debate over Konfabulator vs. Dashboard to the other kids... here's what I'm upset about...
"The acquisition of Konfabulator may not be the last Mac compatible product users see from Yahoo! While Schneider wasn't specific, he did say that there was interest in the Mac. 'There is a move at Yahoo! -- in addition to Konfabulator -- to move more onto the Mac,' said Schneider. 'We want to make sure we find a way to be more cross platform.'"
OK, great. So start by making it possible to browse everything on Yahoo from a Mac! It's really annoying getting a message that my browser (nay, platform) isn't supported by a website. It's not like I'm using an obscure operating system like OS/2 or something.
Furthermore, I'm a cross-platform guy. I grew up using Macs & PCs, though I definitely prefer OSX. Recently, I've found a new love for my old Dell Latitude simply because of the awesomeness that is Yahoo Music Unlimited. What sucks is that I can't use it on my iBook.
For those who don't know, for less than the cost of a case of beer every month, Y! Unlimited is, essentially, a music on-demand system with DRM that's easy to live with. Personally, it's not very important that I "own the music." What's important to me is that I've discovered new music in a way I've missed since the original Napster was destroyed. Only LAUNCHcast and Y! Unlimited is WAY better than everything out there that's currently like it (I'm looking at you remixed Napster and Rhapsody.)
Sure, the download catalog isn't as deep as iTunes Music Store... but I'm sure the gap will eventually shrink. Yahoo is a large company with enough resources to make that happen.
LAUNCHcast, Yahoo's "radio" service, lets me rate music then taylors future songs to my preferences and tastes. It basically serves songs up on the fly without ads. It's really fucking slick.
At any rate, I wish they'd offer Y! Unlimited (or more to the point, Yahoo Music Engine) for OS X, but since it uses WM9 and whatever portable management system requires WinXP, I'm guessing that a port to Macs will probably never materialize. Which is too bad. I'd love to be able to use YME with Airfoil so I could stream it to my Airport Express... without Virtual PC.
A guy can dream...
All those existed before both Konfabulator and Dashboard...
Yes, it's true kids!! Apple is copying Linux this time!
---- You know how some doctors have the Messiah complex - they need to save the world? You've got the "Rubik's" complex
I get all this current information the second I hit F12, it takes me a few seconds to scan it, then I hit F12 again and im back to working again.
You're trying to tell me your tabs are doing all this? You dont have to load them up every time you boot into the OS? I'm sorry, but the entire idea, again, is all this personalized info at a touch of a button, that appears and disappears as quick as you want. Always updates, all the time.
Not to be a naysayer, but am I the only one who doesn't quite see the purpose of widgets?
These are essentially small applications running within a hidden desktop, each additional widget takes up additional resources, and so many of these widgets are redundant. A widget to control your system volume? Isn't that what the volume menu item is for?
Does anybody really need to check traffic so often that it is necessary to have an application running continuously?
I gave widgets the benefit of the doubt when they came out, but found that the actual Widget system in Tiger significantly slowed down our systems and that it was actually more accessible to simply keep my address book or calculator open but minimized rather than having to use key combinations to make a terribly scaled down version of each of those apps (you can't copy and paste from widgets to other applications).
Who knows though, maybe I'm just an old geezer who really doesn't understand the purpose or the actual usefulness of widgets like "Mosquito... A little Widget that displays the mosquito conditions within your zip code for today and tomorrow. " or "Nascar: RSS feed of Nascar news, choose from several feeds including Nextel Cup, Busch Series and Truck Series. Feed time interval settings available also."
Sigh.
Let's take a closer look at this. Yahoo! started as a portal and search engine. Remember the search engine wars? Then Google came along. Back then it was just another search engine (that kinda rocked). However, while we saw search engines come and go (shall we list all the search engines that came to be...and how most of them are gone?) Google didn't sit on it's laurels. They found a profitable way to make money from its searches. Not content with that, they went into other services (maps, blogs, Picasa, toolbars, etc) so people will think of Google for more than searches (sort of like their own "halo effect"...Google is always on their mind). More success for Google. More obscurity for Yahoo. Yahoo, once the Internet's poster child, is not pleased with this and certainly doesn't want to go the way of the other dotcoms, figures adding a whole slew of new features (toolbar, Konfabulator, etc) and mimicking Google is a good way to go. Thus, a new era of "wars" is born.
"He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lampposts...for support rather than illumination." - Andrew Lang