Sunnyvale, California — Struggling search pioneer Yahoo attempting to regain its dominance, announced today that users of Yahoo Mail, My Yahoo, Yahoo Connected TV and Zimbra email will find a number of new widgets and personalized home pages to make its site “sticky” that will give users quicker access to things they do online everyday and keep them on the site longer as it battles with Google and Microsoft for advertising revenue.
Yahoo’s advancing social approach has been dubbed Open Strategy by CEO Carol Bartz. Third-party developers get access to Yahoo’s 1.2 million subscribers.
“We have spent a lot of time thinking about how we can ease the pain of site-hopping to help you do more things at once,” Tapan Bhat, a senior vice president at Yahoo, wrote in a blog post.
New applications for Yahoo Mail, such as this one from PayPal, let you send money right from your inbox without having to visit PayPal’s site. (Credit: Yahoo)
Yahoo in December announced an initiative that it would make its technologies more open to a variety of third-party applications, including Yahoo Greetings, Flixster Movies, Flickr, Photos by Spit, Family Journal, and WordPress. The new apps added Friday on its personalized homepage are part of that initiative.
“This week,” said Bhat, you will find a number of new third-party ‘apps’ and ‘widgets’ on Yahoo! Mail, My Yahoo!, Yahoo! Connected TV, and Zimbra e-mail to give you quicker access to the things you do online every day — whether planning your dinner menu, sharing photos with friends, or looking for YouTube videos.”
According to Bhat, in the US, average consumer visits 85 different Web sites per month. The purpose of Open Strategy, he said, is to figure out how to help consumers do more things at once. The aim is that if you use these apps and widgets on Yahoo sites, you would not have to go to all of those other sites.
The company offers the following slideshow:
The real purpose, of course, is to make the Yahoo home pages “stickier” and, well, “Googlier.” Yahoo was long ago overtaken as the dominant online search engine by Google, and is now chasing to catch up with iGoogle, the widget-enabled home pages that Google offers its users.
This is the second significant home-page announcement from Yahoo recently. On May 26, Bhat outlined the company’s efforts to improve the overall personalization of Yahoo home pages.
“We recently began testing some new designs based on your feedback,” Bhat said. “We recognize that many of you like your homepage just the way it is, thank you very much, so the overall look and feel of the page will be familiar. But take a closer look, and you will see that we have made some fundamental improvements and packed in features that are easy to use and easy to make your own — things you have told us you want.”
Yahoo highlighted the availability of widgets from four companies: Mint.com, Food & Wine Pairing, Green Lifestyle, and WordPress. Yahoo also added an app from WordPress, which lets users post to and update their blogs without leaving the Yahoo network. Just about a dozen other companies have provided widgets for the My Yahoo Gallery, and the company says others are on their way.
To add, click on the “add content” on my.yahoo.com and select your app of choice.
A total of 18 apps are currently available, these specifically include:
For third-party widget developers, the new homepage potentialities opens the opportunity to tap into Yahoo’s established base of millions of users. Mint.com CEO Aaron Putzer predicted his site could add as many as a couple of hundred thousand users, roughly a 15 percent increase in the financial-service company’s 1.2 million subscriber base.
Take a video tour of “A Day in the Life of a Yahoo! Mail”
Although, Yahoo has taken quite some time to put these applications together, wheh it initially announced the Yahoo Open Strategy in April 2008 but not taking it live until last December, when it unveiled the first set of applications for Yahoo Mail and the MyYahoo start page.
Nevertheless, now there are more than a dozen of apps available for My Yahoo, which can be found at the My Yahoo Gallery. These include WordPress QuickPress, Flood-it, Books weRead, Time Zone Planner, Simply Get Things Done, What’s Cookin’ Food&Wine Pairing, Green Lifestyle, Mint.com, Hey Einstein, kaChing Stock Investing, GreatSchools, GasPrices, Today on Forbes.com, and My Medication Record.