Yahoo Music - From the Desktop
Michael Arrington
20 comments »
One of the key new features of Windows Vista and IE7 is something called Sidebar, which is a gadget platform. This will allow Live.com gadgets to be used right on the Windows desktop.I wrote a little bit about this after attending a Microsoft event called Search Champs in January.
Yahoo Music has very quietly released an Ajax gadget for Sidebar that will allow user to play Yahoo Music right from a Windows desktop, and it’s giving me a lot of ideas around the types of things that we’ll be seeing very soon.
Before this, to use Yahoo’s unlimited music product (all you can download and listen to music for $5 per month) you had to download the Yahoo Music Engine, which is their version of iTunes (a client based media player). But based on what Ian Rogers writes on the Yahoo Music Blog, this will no longer be the case. You will be able to listen to music right from a Windows desktop without using the Yahoo Music Engine.
I’ve included a couple of screen shots, including a close up of the player and a larger shot showing it on a Windows desktop. More screen shots are available on Ian’s post, linked above. You can also see a demo at this link, just skip ahead to 28 minutes and 10 seconds.
So the really interesting thing about this is, what other web and desktop applications will we be able to use via a gadget on the Windows desktop? My guess is, pretty much everything.
The thing i dislike about those widgets is that most of the times their UI is very different from the standard UI provided by the OS.
Actually, this is rather an interesting move. I guess the enemy (Microsoft) of your enemy (Google) really is your friend then. I had assumed that Yahoo! would only release things like this for Konfabulator, I’m sorry I mean Yahoo! Widget Engine.
Slighly off topic but where did you get that desktop backdrop?
How is this different from the concept of Widgets in Apple’s OS X? What is new or original in Microsoft’s approach?
Maybe it’s the fact that these apps aren’t “sandboxed” as they are via a hotkey…but live out on the desktop? Enlighten me.
what a nice trashcan
Here is an interesting perspective on Windows Vista and how it will affect online video, music, and photos.
Why Windows Vista Delay is Bad News for Apple and Google
No innovation at all Konfabulator was first + you can free widgets from the dashboard:
http://www.mesadynamics.com/amnesty.htm
_
Vista is looking very osx-ish these days
wow. shakira looks really hot here.
So Yahoo are using the Konfabulator technology? And the add-on your download is the Konfabulator add-on?
Looks like the widget engine to me. I would like to add that Yahoo really need to figure out what to do with musicmatch. That is a much superior product for music libraries, but music engine has some other advantages. Two similar products makes me worry a little about the future of either.
This is why I think the Flash Platform is ahead of AJAX when it comes to really building Rich Internet Applications. It already allows for this kind of seemless multimedia integration. Whether or not a combination of AJAX/Vista changes the landscape will be interesting to see.
@ david - Apple didn’t invent widgets, and Widgets are on non Macs too.. just as easy and just as long actaully. Apple copied them (with permission) Yahoo own’s them now, and well, this is how they are using the technology they bought.
Kinda lame that Yahoo can’t offer this in Konfabulator or in just a plain old browser window. Why is Vista needed for this?
How is any crap that runs on the desktop something to do with “Tracking Web 2.0″? One of the main themes this time around is be user-centric, not device-centric (or ‘locked’).
Additionally, I’d be really careful with Atlas and any other ‘2.0′ tools from Redmond as they are not to be trusted. Just becasue they are pumping-out sites with round corners and big fonts doesn’t mean they won’t be up to their old tricks — namely “embrace and replace”… “tie to the platform” (Windows OS, MS Office and Internet Exploder) and “subvert the new languages du jour” …watch, they will try to screw JavaScript and XML again they way they screwed HTML, XML, VBScript(!), Java & JavaVM, etc. the last time. WELCOME TO THE BROWSER WARS 2.0. Billy smells an opportunity - that’s why they are working on the next two releases of IExploder –to twist the whole thing back to their tools and their OS.
>>>Kinda lame that Yahoo can’t offer this in Konfabulator or in just a plain old browser window. Why is Vista needed for this?>>
Looks like they have a working version for Widget Engine, just not released yet. Likely a licensing issue - it’ll happen in time.
god i hate shakira.
Still copying from Apple…
How quickly you all forget… it’s sad. When OSX came out - most of the concepts in it were copied from VISTA! Microsoft had published what it was going to do years prior to OSX and Mac copied them. At the time, Apple was getting all the bad press about coping Microsoft (even going as far as saying the creator is now the copy cat)… today, 4 years later and still WAY past schedule, you all scream that Microsoft is coping Apple. How funny things turn out.