Using Yahoo! Widgets in business

Six months ago, I met Yahoo! Widgets , and this technology immediately fascinated me with the ease of development and user friendliness.
I went deep into coding, spent several sleepless nights, twisted on a local forum and made a widget that was honored to be published in the Yahoo gallery. Along the way, read what they write about Yahoo! Western marketers Widgets and discussed emerging ideas with several managers of Russian Internet projects, so now I want to share some thoughts regarding their practical application.

In the West Yahoo! Widgets are actively used for marketing purposes. Here are a couple of examples. Animal Planet

Channel made the Animal Planet Killer Clips widget", with which you can watch video recordings of attacks by predators on their victims. To date, the widget has been downloaded 11,288 times. Acura , the North American branch of Honda, has introduced the Acura RDX Traffic widget , which shows traffic jams and traffic accident information on the map. Uploaded 48 401 times. And Toyota made a widget called “ Toyota FF Pick-Ups, ” in which American football is adjacent to car ads. It was downloaded 62,970 times. Honda, Best Buy, Disney and even Pfizer have their own widgets.

So, what are the advantages of Yahoo! Widgets from a business perspective?

• Great features in terms of functionality: from inserting Flash to accessing the operating system.
• Reduced development costs thanks to ready-made modules included in the engine.
• Attractive design.
• Ease of installing widgets (although only accepted in the Yahoo gallery).
• Name and reliability. This is a technology developed by a well-known company for several years. You can say the "veteran" of the world of desktop widgets.
• The duration of contact with the user. Yahoo! Widgets work regardless of whether there is an Internet connection, and the user remains with you, even closing the browser window: from the moment the computer is turned on until it is turned off. However, this is common to all desktop widgets.

But not without flaws.

• Proprietary technology. Your users will need to install a program that does not belong to you (the engine itself). If you are the owner of an online store or a small site, the name of a large company can even be a plus for you. But if Yahoo is a competitor for you, it’s worth another thought.
• Using your API and markup language. Untrained developers will need time to figure out how to write widgets.
• Not full localization. The engine interface is translated into Russian, but the site Yahoo! Widgets and most of the widgets are in English, which may be difficult for some users.
• Great time to add a widget to the gallery and the lack of a standalone installer. To use one of the main advantages of widgets, ease of installation, you have to be patient: my widget has been waiting for approval for more than a month.

Conclusions.

Yahoo! Widgets can be used:

• when creating widgets targeted to western users
• if you focus on Russian-speaking, but more or less technically savvy users (at least able to read in English)
• if you are going to make not one widget, but several at once. In this case, reducing development costs and a unified widget management system will prove especially good.