Yahoo has acquired Konfabulator, a maker of widgets that sit on your desktop displaying content - like the weather or news - so you don't have to click into an application like a web browser to view the content. Konfabulator, now called Yahoo Widgets, allows any user (not just "developers") to create their own desktop widget.

Jeffrey McManus, former Senior Manager of eBay's platform evangelism team, joined Yahoo in April as Director, Developer Network. He stated in his blog on Monday that he went to work on the Konfabulator acquisition with his boss almost immediately after joining Yahoo (http://mcmanus.typepad.com/grind/2005/07/yahooacquires.html).

Earlier this month, McManus said Yahoo engineers have a lot of latitude to pursue projects, and called the environment at eBay a "don't screw it up" mentality. He said it took eBay much too long, in his opinion, to internalize the concept of Community Codebase, a collaborative program for developers (http://www.auctionbytes.com/cab/abn/y05/m06/i21/s00).

Search guru Louis Monier seemed to echo those thoughts when he left eBay to go to Google last month. He told John Battelle, "The main reason for me to leave is that eBay does not absorb innovation at the pace I enjoy, and its focus is narrower than Google" (http://battellemedia.com/archives/001653.php).

According to MacCentral, "Yahoo said the reason they purchased Konfabulator was that 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" (http://digbig.com/4ebrc).

Users of the widgets may click through to Yahoo for more content, driving traffic to its site. Yahoo also recently made it free to sell items on its auction platform, where more traffic will benefit its Yahoo Search Marketing program, formerly called Overture.

Of the new Yahoo Widgets, McManus said, "One could conceivably use it to build a widget that monitors eBay auctions, for example, or manages product photos. And if they did that, we'd be tickled pink."

A perusal of a few widgets in the gallery revealed a widget called the eBay Feedback Watcher, which displays your eBay feedback rating: "When you receive a new feedback it can display a slide-out notification window showing your new feedback with a clickable link to the eBay item. It will also display a summary of what's changed in your feedback since the last time the widget was run on startup."

http://www.konfabulator.com

http://widgets.yahoo.com