Yahoo opens up Yahoo Go 3.0 to third parties

As the world is becoming more open, interoperable and social, everything is going mobile, and the future becomes about making the Web experience simpler and more efficient for its more than one billion users to manage their online and offline lives, Jerry Yang, CEO of Yahoo told Consumer Electronics Show attendees today.

Yang posed the question of how to make users’ multiple social networks and the deep, meaningful relationships they’ve built on the Internet simple for the users. The answer? Be the starting point. As a way to become more relevant, Yahoo today unveiled Yahoo Go 3.0, an upgrade to its 2.0 service announced last year.

“Our goal is to help you make the most of your busy life by being what we’ve always been, the start of the Web experience,” Yang said. “Our challenge is to create a simple starting point that makes it easy to take advantage of all rich content and connectivity out there on mobile devices.”

Marco Boerries, Yahoo’s senior vice president of Connected Life, called the Mobile 3.0 service an even more beautiful, rich and stunning user experience.

“What made 2.0 great was the carousel on the bottom for easy navigation,” he said. “Now it is much more intuitive to use.” The 3.0 version will not feature a carousel, but rather the Yahoo home page, built into the mobile device. Advancements include a multitude of widgets that act as shortcuts for users to compose email messages, connect to the mobile version of photo-sharing site Flickr, as well as a host of Yahoo staples – sports, news, finance, weather, entertainment and maps. Reminiscent of Apple’s iPhone, the new Yahoo Go Now stores what a user did in each widget to keep their place if they opt to switch between different functions, like mapping and email.

In addition to a refined user interface, Yang introduced keynote attendees to the revamped Yahoo home page for mobile, which he said is “rewritten from scratch to create an indispensable starting point of the mobile Internet that is fully open and dynamic.”

Yang said that the number-one complaint of all the millions of people who downloaded Yahoo Go was that they wanted more than just Yahoo services accessible on their mobile handsets. Eager to please, Yahoo also announced today that it will open up its platform to third-party developers, publishers and advertisers to create widgets that consumers can subscribe to through the widget gallery.

To kick-start its open platform, Yahoo has formed partnerships with MySpace, MTV News and eBay to optimize their Web sites for mobile and create widgets on the Yahoo mobile homepage.

Yang and Boerries noted, however, that the possibilities don’t stop there. Consumers can add any Internet content they want on their homepage through the Yahoo snippet gallery, a series of modules that preview the fuller set of content a consumer is using. Boerries said he expects this gallery to be very full over time.

Consumers can also add RSS feeds manually to customize their home pages and get services they deem essential to their lives. As to be expected, the platform also affords advertisers all the same advantages that content delivers benefit from. The ecosystem Yang hopes to foster will allow advertisers or publishers to only write the widget once, and Yahoo will take it from there – making sure the content can translate into the user environment.

“An advantage to adding widgets to Yahoo is that you have a very easy way to use the Yahoo blueprint to add a mobile application,” Yang said. “It is a full-feature application. Everything you can do on the PC you can do on the mobile widget with a great user experience.”

The Yahoo home page will run on the mobile browser of any phone that supports HTML and has a browser. Essentially a phone that connects to the Internet today that does more than voice and SMS can now run Yahoo Go Widgets, Boerries said.

In particular, Yang and Boerries announced partnerships with Motorola and LG to develop the mobile widgets right into their devices as native applications and expect more partnership announcements to come. “So no matter what type of phone you have, it is our purpose and mission in life to make sure these widgets run in the best possible way on those devices,” Yang said.