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.'"

Comments

Cheap buy?

[Chmarr]

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 :)

Re:Cheap buy?

[ceeam]

I wonder whether more Konfabulator copies were actually sold for Windows than for Macs?

Re:too lazy to google right now

[uprock_x]

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

Re:Good press begins with the Mac

[jesterzog]

I don't find this surprising. Lately, it seems that Yahoo has been getting some of the positive internet buzz that used to be reserved solely for Google.

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.

Re:Clutter

[coldmist]

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.

Rivalry/Adoption

[SeaFox]

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.

Re:looks like the semantic web is taking off

[mstone]

• platform independent - the same widget will run on a Mac or a PC.
  
  
• application framework - Konfabulator (or Dashboard) does some of the work, so you don't have to slog through Mozilla-we've-created-our-own-version-of-every-dat a-class-in-the-universe hell.
  
  
• one-size-fits-all constraints - you "download info and display it" when you play Halo, but nobody freaks out because they can't use Halo to read Slashdot or order books from Amazon. Halo can just concentrate on being Halo, rather than trying to be Halo, plus a web browser, plus Everquest, plus the Sims online, etc. Much the same way, a widget can concentrate on doing one thing well, without having to put up with the IE/Firefox/Mozilla/Opera/Safari windows, toolbars, menus, and other associated cruft.
  
  
• doesn't have to be stateless - a widget can download and display information, then keep using that information while some of the other information changes.. as opposed to a web browser, which has to pass the same damn package of data back and forth every time the user goes to a new page, or play all sorts of stupid games with cookies, session keys, database storage, and so forth.
  
  

Yahoo! is following Google's lead

[chia_monkey]

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.