Opening up Yahoo’s platform to third-party developers will be key to company’s strategy of tapping the growing number of online users of PC and mobile devices.
Yahoo’s Open Platform initiatives will allow independent third-party developers to create applications suited to run across operating systems. For a user, it means being able to access applications across devices without the operating system limitation.
“Yahoo wants to be the one-stop platform for Internet users where they can access the service of their choice in one place,” said Adam Taggart, Director, Product Marketing, Yahoo! Mobile. “The idea is to let users stay on Yahoo’s pages to access their favourite services instead of letting them wander through the Web.”
To begin with, Yahoo has opened up its downloadable widget service, Yahoo Go 3.0, where developers can create innovative applications that users can access in the same place irrespective of the handset or the operator. Going ahead, users will be able to add third-party applications on Yahoo’s homepage and the day is not far when users will even be able to access their Gmail on Yahoo’s homepage. “Without hits there is no open platform,” said David Ko, Managing Director & Vice-President, Connected Life, Asia Pacific Yahoo.
Symbian, Windows, Palm and iPhone OS are some of the popular operating systems for mobile phones today while Windows, Linux and Mac are the counterparts on the PC. Most applications are designed to work on specific OS, which means an application has to be tweaked to the requirements of a certain platform before a user can use it. For instance, Widsets is a proprietary service of Nokia that allows users to create feeds for their favourite online content but runs only on devices based on a specific series (Series 60) of the Symbian OS.
{{/usCountry}}Symbian, Windows, Palm and iPhone OS are some of the popular operating systems for mobile phones today while Windows, Linux and Mac are the counterparts on the PC. Most applications are designed to work on specific OS, which means an application has to be tweaked to the requirements of a certain platform before a user can use it. For instance, Widsets is a proprietary service of Nokia that allows users to create feeds for their favourite online content but runs only on devices based on a specific series (Series 60) of the Symbian OS.
{{/usCountry}}Last year, Google announced its open mobile operating system Android that will support applications created by third-party developers. “We are ready to partner with competition and if Android is successful we will run our applications on that as well,” said Ko.