Mint Widget And Other YAP Apps Make It To Yahoo's Home Page

With the new Yahoo homepage that was previewed last July and is now rolling out more broadly as part of Yahoo’s new “It’s Y!ou” branding exercise, the main Yahoo homepage is taking on more of the personalization features on MyYahoo. There are all sorts of handy widgets in the left-hand column ranging from Facebook status updates to Gmail to any news feed (just type in a URL like Techcrunch.com and it will add the feed). When you hover over any of the widgets, a box opens up covering most of the homepage with information from that widget.

Today, Yahoo is making it possible to add applications made on the Yahoo Application Platform (YAP) to that sidebar as well. One of the first apps it is launching with is from personal finance tracker Mint, with its Budget by Mint widget. Other YAP apps launching today on the homepage include A-Z Wine Pairings from MyRecipes & Snooth, Books weRead by WeRead, Brain Trainer by Lumosity, a social version of the Flood-it game by LabPixies, kaChing’s virtual stock portfolio app, Movies by Flixster, and WordPRess QuickPress. YAP is part of Yahoo’s Open Strategy that it kicked off last year.

The Budget by Mint widget and other YAP apps are already available on MyYahoo, but getting on the main Yahoo homepage potentially puts it on front of 118 million American users a month, versus 25 million for My Yahoo (comScore). The app ties into your Mint account, and shows pie charts and bar graphs of your budget, spending trends, and alerts. You can see the percentage of your budget that is going to taxes, shopping, dining, bills, and other expenses, and even share that with your friends if you are into that sort of personal financial transparency.

Mint launched two years ago at TechCrunch40, and was bought by Intuit for $170 million earlier this month.

Here is what the Budget by Mint widget looks like when it opens up in Yahoo: