CES: Yahoo! Wants to Be Your Only Needed Mobile Destination

Yahoo! has announced that it will foster platform independence by allowing third-party developers to create mobile widgets for its mobile platform, Yahoo Go 3.0, just announced as a beta release. On a larger scale, the move represents a land grab for dominance over the mobile user experience.

To wit, co-founder and CEO Jerry Yang told audiences at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas that Yahoo! plans to “be the most essential starting point for your life."

Perhaps some explaining is in order. Widgets are tiny applications that are purpose-built to do one thing, such as deliver stock quotes, provide weather updates or act as a VoIP plug-in. The applications sit on a desktop and fetch information from the Internet on an ongoing basis, and are always up and running. Thus, users can customize their Internet experience using widgets, essentially creating their own portals that deliver only the information relevant to their needs or provide links out to wanted IP services.

When it comes to mobile widgets, the constraints of carrier data plans have necessitated that users load a mobile portal to view widget information, as opposed to the apps sitting as a micro-window on the desktop, always on. That has constrained adoption, many say. As unlimited data plans roll out, that could change, making mobile widgets more compelling.

For Yahoo!’s part, it hopes to make that constraint less of a burden, as well as make mobile Internet use more attractive. Yahoo Go gives users a mobile Internet portal for access to Yahoo!'s services, including e-mail, Flickr, messaging, maps and directions, weather and news. In the 3.0 release, users can add in their own widgets to link to non-Yahoo! Internet information, tailoring the portal to give access to a customized range of services — rather than having to open up several mobile Web sites to access the wanted information. That’s an attractive proposition considering the clunkiness of the mobile Web experience to date.

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