Yahoo! Inc. on Monday will announce the acquisition of Konfabulator, a Macintosh and Windows application that allows users to run mini files known as Widgets on their desktop -- the same model used by Apple for its Dashboard application. Yahoo! company executives said they would also be giving Konfabulator away for free, completely doing away with the US$19.95 currently charged for the product.
Yahoo! said the reason they purchased Konfabulator was that they wanted an easy way to open up its APIs to the developer community and allow them easy access to the information on the Yahoo! Web site. In doing this, Widgets could be built without having to scrape sites in order to get information.
What we can do with Konfabulator is wrap these services that we are opening up into an environment that is really easy for people to now become developers, Tony Schneider, vice president of the Yahoo! Developer Network, told MacCentral.
Schneider also confirmed that Konfabulator would be available for free. In addition, Yahoo! plans to refund customers that purchased the product in the last two months.
The acquisition of Konfabulator may not be the last Mac compatible product users see from Yahoo! While Schneider wasnt specific, he did say that there was interest in the Mac.
There is a move at Yahoo! -- in addition to Konfabulator -- to move more onto the Mac, said Schneider. We want to make sure we find a way to be more cross platform.
