Yahoo follows suit: presents development platform for mobile

After all the buzz in the back-end of last year over the Google-led Open Handset Alliance and their Android OS, Yahoo! has now presented its own view on how to reduce the complexity within the mobile landscape by announcing a development platform for "mobile internet applications".

It is, alas, not the full bag of tricks: Unlike Android, which is of course basically an OS, the Yahoo! scheme only foresees tools to allow the creation of widgets to run under the company's Yahoo! Go mobile service or in any mobile web browser. This means that "mobile internet applications" in Yahoo speak do not include "classic" mobile applications (developed in J2ME, BREW, Symbian, etc, and then downloaded to a user's phone), and the latter will not benefit from the initiative.

The question (and this may well be one of the big ones for 2008) is therefore if the (short) age of downloadable applications is already dawning. Because, unlike the Internet, mobile is a cluttered space with a gazillion operating systems and middleware layers on even more different devices competing for market share. Ease to port applications at least across handsets and ideally also across operating systems is therefore the crucial factor. Only if downloadable applications (including indeed a software package like Yahoo! Go) really are displaced by the mobile internet proper would this change.

Commentators note that Yahoo! Go is not normally available on handsets as most tier-1 operators will (and apparently each and every US carrier currently does) simply remove pre-installed applications prior to delivery to customers. However, this does not seem to matter too much as far as the new initiative is concerned as it is said to run on every browser, too. It may take away from discovery and therefore usage so this is where it appears to chip away on the benefits: Whilst the Yahoo! move would seem the much less complex initiative compared to Google's attempts to take on the OS heavyweights, it comes at the cost of lower usability for users and also less actual benefit for developers: why would you develop for that platform if visibility, discovery, usage and therefore commercial reward are foggy at best?

I'm not convinced (yet).

Smart negotiations OR headaches with widget economics...

Not really mobile but rather noteworthy and juicy, so here goes: According to TechCrunch, MySpace pockets Photobucket, the web's #1 photo site (ahead of Flickr) for some $250m + earn-outs. Photobucket has 40m users, much more than YouTube had when they were acquired by Google. Therefore, TechCrunch contends that MySpace made a killing. So far interesting but not really out of the ordinary. Now, here comes then:

There have been consistent rumours that MySpace briefly flexed its muscles when in later stages of negotiations with Photobucket. In short: it shut the Photobucket links on its sites down (see here). All this was about, well, $$$: MySpace would not benefit from ads that are embedded on Photobucket's widgets. This constitutes a violation of MySpace's terms (rather understandable). So: Shutdown! ... A brief reminder on just how much Photobucket depended on MySpace's platform in order to sustain its user based and value. The site generated lots of traffic for Photobucket-hosted content: according to the Photobucket co-founder and CEO, Alex Welch, quoted in the above posting, 50%+ of all MySpace pages contain Photobucket content... They were between a rock and a hard place as the position of widget makers and their "hosts" is uneasy at best (see the interesting post of Andrew Chen here).

In any case, at that price, it was certainly a deal that looks much healthier than YouTube did ($13 vs. $67 per user) - the numbers again are as per TechCrunch - and I would applaud MySpace on some nifty piece of negotiating! Given the whole interdependancy in the widget world, it was probably a proper win-win, too. Halleluja!