Yahoo Go 3.0 is rapidly becoming its own operating system. With the recent announcement of third party widgets, Yahoo has truly entered a new position in the mobile eco-system. Yahoo Go was already a terrific collection of software and had pretty deep functionality (I especially liked the Flickr access), but with the addition of relatively easy to create widgets that can live inside the Yahoo application, Yahoo has made itself a formidible player in the mobile space. By creating an environment that acts as a platform, Yahoo has made itself a reasonable friend of the development community.
The interesting aspects of Go 3.0:
- Off Deck: No carrier interference…ad supported?
- Good Reach: Yahoo Go supports roughly 300 handsets at the moment. This saves developers thousands and thousands of hours of porting and development time. Further, Yahoo Go is already cross platform, so Java developers, or BREW developers, or ‘Berry developers get access to a new slew of demographically diverse folks…without any effort.
- Yahoo is heavily invested in making Yahoo Go a success, so Yahoo bears the brunt of finding the interested customers.
- Any experience built to work inside Yahoo Go will work as a stand alone experience…very good stuff.
The bad things about Yahoo Go:
- Off Deck: No Carrier Push
- Your experience will live inside a Yahoo branded thing
- I would imagine that any advertising revenue will be sourced and controlled by Yahoo, limiting your potential financial gain
- No clear storefront/m-commerce opportunities
I think this is a great move by Yahoo! Good luck!
