Following an industry trend toward “openness,” Yahoo! announced plans to open up its mobile platform, allowing outside programmers to develop mobile widgets. Yahoo! plans to launch a toolkit over the next few weeks, which will include a more robust software development kit, tools and support. Developers will build the widgets using Yahoo’s own XHTML-based programming language.
The Internet giant also announced plans to redesign its mobile home pages so viewers can more easily access content and can customize what info they view on their handsets. Yahoo! is also upgrading its mobile Go application. Go also will now include advertising.
Yahoo!’s Go 2.0 currently runs on more than 250 mobile phones. At launch, Yahoo! Go 3.0 will support roughly 30 devices, but the company expects to expand that quickly to hundreds of devices worldwide. Users of either service will be able to access to new widgets developed by third party programmers.
