Last week, my former team at Yahoo! launched Yahoo! TV Widgets to some great press coverage. This is a project that was underway before I left, and drew heavily on the work and people of the Konfabulator/Y! Widgets team. It goes all the way back to the original Konfabulator team of Arlo Rose, Perry Clarke, and Ed Voas, who first popularized the term “Widget” for consumers as “whatever you want it to be” (much to the chagrin of Marketing & PR folks and proud mothers of people who work on Widgets everywhere 😉 ). They pioneered the concepts of open developer platforms and mash-ups that are all the Web 2.0 rage today, they just did it on the desktop. By the time I joined the team nearly a year after Konfabulator was acquired by Yahoo!, they had built a thriving ecosystem (yes, it was a real ecosystem, so I can say that without being buzzword compliant) of thousands of independent developers and millions of users worldwide.
As we continued to build the team and grow both the user and developer bases, we began to learn and build things that we realized had much broader applicability than just Widgets for your desktop. With the help of our marketing all-stars, Brady Wood and the awesome Shan-Lyn Ma, we started to create best practices and tools for building and cultivating a community of independent developers around an open platform and helping connect them to users. This work resulted in the relaunch of the Yahoo! Widget Gallery (which, for the sake of that douche over at VentureBeat, pre-dated the iPhone App Store) and a number of other improvements for the desktop Widgets product. But, it also became an essential part of the launch of Yahoo! Mobile Widgets at CES, the TV Widget launch at IDF last week, and some other stuff that’s still in the works down in Sunnyvale. It was also a great opportunity for us Konfabulistas, many of whom got to work on some of these fun projects and some of whom even moved on to these new teams.
So, in addition to being happy for my friends, who have been working on the TV Widgets project these last few months since I left, I’m proud to see the work we started (finally) coming to fruition. Way to go guys (and girls)!