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The Newness is Here!
November 16th, 2007
A lot’s happened in Widgetland since we first launched the widgets.yahoo.com site more than 2 years ago. Of course we’ve shipped a couple major versions of Yahoo! Widgets, and we’ve improved the site with additions like our Widget badges and the in-page installer. But in that same time, the catalog of Widgets in the Yahoo! Widget Gallery has more than doubled. And to be totally frank, our tools for finding Widgets haven’t quite kept up.
Today, we’re very proud to reveal the fruits of months of hard work and kick-off a new era for Yahoo! Widgets with the brand-spanking-new widgets.yahoo.com. Much of the work in this release went into rebuilding (almost) the entire site from the ground up on top of Yahoo!’s powerful search, community, and personalization platforms. What that means to you is this is just the beginning — we have laid a solid foundation on which we can more rapidly innovate and deliver new features to improve your Yahoo! Widgets experience. But, that doesn’t mean there aren’t plenty of cool things for you to start enjoying today. Far from it, we think the new site is packed with quite a bit of awesome. So, here’s a little primer to get you started.
The first thing you will likely notice is the new look. With the most recent update of the Yahoo! Weather Widget a few months back, we began exploring a visual refresh across our entire product suite. You’ll continue to see updated looks in other Yahoo! Widgets products with releases over the next few months.
The Widget Gallery is now the central point of focus for the site, and we’ve simplified the navigation into a section for those looking to “Find Widgets” and one for those looking to “Create Widgets.” The reason we’ve focussed on the Gallery is simple: the Yahoo! Widgets experience should be about connecting people with the 4,300+ Widgets in our Gallery and the authors who created them. With our Install-o-Matic technology first deployed in Yahoo! Widgets 4, people can focus on finding the Widget they want without having to worry about any required components.
The front page of the Gallery now makes it easy to check-out the top-rated, most-downloaded, and newest Widgets at a glance. You can also keep up to date on what’s happening in those categories or others by subscribing to our new RSS feeds on the front page and on all search results pages. And we have a new Widget Spotlight that now features 5 Widgets at a time and does cool slidey things. 
In order to be officially Web 2.0 (or are we up to 3.0 at this point?) compliant, we’ve migrated our old category system over to tags. The top tags can be browsed from the Gallery front page. And we surface related Widgets to you on the search results and Widget detail pages via common tags. Currently, tags are editorially assigned. But, we plan to open this up to tagging by Widget authors and consumers in the future.
For those of you who know exactly what you want, don’t worry, we didn’t forget about search (as evidenced by that big honkin’ search box on the Gallery front page). As part of the total overhaul of the site, we took advantage of the latest technology from our friends in Yahoo! Search to make Widget searches waaaaaaay faster and more relevant. We also added the ability to sort your search results by relevance, number of downloads, ratings, or date of last update.
Once you find the Widget you’re interested in, there’s now more information about it and more ways to show your love (or not). We’ve switched over to Yahoo!-standard ratings (5-stars, but don’t worry we made sure to map all the existing 4-star ratings to the new scale) and reviews, which, among other things, lets you sort reviews by how helpful other people have found them. And we also added our own little Widgety twist with the new “Beautiful,” “Useful,” “Fun” ratings — you can cast one vote in each category, and the one with the most votes shows up below the Widget’s star rating. It’s also now easier to share the Widgets you love by IM, email, or by adding a Widget badge to your own web page.
For Widget authors, the one page that was our “Widgets Workshop” has been expanded to become the “Create Widgets” section of the site. In this release, we’ve added more content to help Widget authors with submitting and promoting their Widgets. And we have exciting plans to expand this section into *the* destination for Widget authors to build and manage their Yahoo! Widgets.
That covers some of the highlights for the initial release, and there’s more info on our What’s New page. There are also a couple of other notable changes:
Yes, there are now ads. In addition to the obvious reasons for adding advertisements in general, we actually believe the new graphical ad on the front page and the sponsored links on the search results pages will prove to be valuable tools for Widget authors and thus ultimately consumers as well. One of our top requests from Widget authors has been for a better way to promote their Widgets to the right audiences, and now we’re opening that up in a more systematic way. If you’re interested in learning more, check out the new Promote Widgets page. From a consumer standpoint, the advertising placements are clearly marked and our goal is to make them as relevant as possible. There’s a feedback link on the ad on the front page, so please let us know how you think we’re doing.
If you’re reading this (and not in an RSS reader), you will have likely noticed that nothing has actually changed on this page. This blog and the Forums were on separate systems than the rest of the site. And in the interest of focusing all of our effort on improving core functionality, we’ve decided to maintain that split for now. We do plan to eventually migrate both sections to new platforms, but not for a little while still.
As of today, Widget authors will need to link their existing Widget Gallery accounts with a valid Yahoo! ID in order to manage their existing Widgets or submit new ones. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause, but it was truly a necessity. The primary benefit of Yahoo! ID based author identities is the ability to offer more robust author profiles going forward, which we believe will help build stronger connections between consumers and the authors of the Widgets they love. To be clear, there is no forced migration to Yahoo! ID author accounts if you don’t wish to modify your existing Widgets or submit new ones. But those authors who do link their existing Widgets to a Yahoo! ID will be able to customize how they show up in the Gallery, including adding a picture to their author identity. For more information on author accounts, please check out our Help section and join the conversation in the Forums.
That should be more than enough to get you started, so what are you waiting for? Hop over to the new widgets.yahoo.com and start checking out the new hotness. We really put a lot into this, and sincerely hope you’re as excited about it as we are. And as I mentioned, this is only the beginning — keep checking back for more improvements in the weeks and months to come. We’re also very eager to hear what you think (the good *and* the bad) to help us make the new site even better, so please do make use of the Suggestions link at the bottom of every page.
Thanks, and enjoy!
- the entire Yahoo! Widgets team
P.S. The launch required some DNS changes, so it may take a few days for everyone to see the new site. We apologize for any funky behavior between now and then.
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I appreciate that change takes some time to get used to - however I think in this case you have let form dictate function.
Someone came up with a “nice” design and you guys threw out the simple functionality you used to have to follow that design. As a user I do two things with widgets. I look for fun new widgets (and you guys buried the gallery but I did find it), and I also look for updated widgets (and I can’t for the life of me find a page that shows updated widgets anymore).
So from my perspective for the sake of a new design you sacrificed key user functionality.
@Stuart: Right below the search box on the home page, there’s a module that has 3 lists of 4 Widgets each: “Top Rated,” “Top Downloads,” and “What’s New?” (you can use the arrows next to the headlines to switch between the lists). There’s a link at the bottom of the “What’s New?’ list to “All New Widgets” which goes here http://widgets.yahoo.com/search/new. Hope that helps.
Your link for the badges is incorrect. For some reason the directory you should point to is /badgers. I don’t know why, but it works.
– Sean
There’s a bug in the download count… Oxygen launched the Ovulator widget this last update. An hour ago it said 759 downloads, now it says 259 downloads. Appears as if there’s an offset by 500?
@Chris: We migrated the databases before the site went live, which means that any downloads that occurred between the site going live and the migration will not have been counted on any Widget.
Hey guys,
I know you’ve been putting a lot of effort into this, and I don’t mean to bitch, but the installation of the new widget engine for Mac (Leopard) is just not happening.
First, the installation for Mac is just, well, really wonky. Let me explain, sorry if it’s long-winded…
I tried installing a couple of different times, and noticed two different things:
The first time I tried to download the “Starter Pack”, a.dmg file was downloaded, which revealed a “Yahoo! Installer 2.plugin” file, and I was told to move it to the Internet plug-ins folder. Ok, but then what ? This is just a plugin file, not an installer for the engine application. Then I noticed that the engine app had been actually dumped into the Applications folder. So I double-click this app file to open it, thinking the engine will spring to life….and nothing happens.
Take 2:
I delete the engine app and all other files, to re-start from a clean slate. I proceed to go back to http://widgets.yahoo.com/download/ to download the “Starter Pack” again. Strangely, this time, instead of getting a .dmg, the installation process has suddenly switched to “online”, and now, on the Yahoo page, I’m presented with :
“Install Widget Starter Pack?
The following items will be installed:
Widget Starter Pack (5MB)
Support Files (4MB)”
When this installation process finishes, I click the yellow “Use Widget” button in my browser (Firefox / Safari…same result), and I get a pop-up window that says:
“http://badge.ydp.clientapps.yahoo.com
Sorry, we were unable to open Metro 95.1 FM Radio Player.widget for you.”
I notice again that the widget engine app is now in my Applications folder, but no cigar.
Hope at least these comments are constructive. In the meantime, thanks for your efforts.
@Shawn: The difference between Take 1 and Take 2 is our in-page installer. Once the Yahoo! Installer browser plug-in is installed, we can give you the right components and do the whole install from the web. It’s been working pretty well since we launched it on the old site back in March. But, there seem to have been a few glitches in the transition to the new site.
Unfortunately, the larger issue in your case is that Yahoo! Widgets 4 currently doesn’t work in Leopard. If you wish, you can join the flame session. But, we assure you a new version that is compatible with Leopard (and does other fun stuff) is on its way soon.
Hey Jonathan, thanks for the response. My bad - I interpreted “Newness is Here” with Leopard compatibility.
No-no, no flaming from me!
I know you guys aren’t getting some of the credit you really deserve, so I tip my hat to all your efforts.
Shawn
Ottawa, Ontario
I would hardly call that flaming.. I think the overwhelming majority of users are being respectful, and their comments only show how much they like and use Konfabulator/YWE day-to-day (sorry, I still think Konfabulator is a better name ^_^).
Keep up the good work; we’re anticipating the Leopard-compatible update because we like it!
@Shawn and Blufire: Thanks for your understanding. We very much appreciate the passion that people show for our product.
I’ve been a long time user of Konfabulator and I have to agree, this new site is tough to use compared to the old one. For the life of me I couldn’t find the old installer download. Perhaps it’s a compatibility issue with Leopard but please just give me a DMG to install don’t force me to add another installer pluggin to my system. You all do good work, just don’t make it more difficult for the end user.
I’m having issues, and I’m just wondering if it’s because I am on 64-bit Windows.
Anyway, whenever I click a download button for a widget, the button simply rolls up and then nothing happens… no download box, nothing pops-up, and nothing is installed. This in both Firefox 2.0.8 (32-bit) and Internet Explorer 6 (64-bit)
It’s no better when I try to use the app itself. I can use any of the standard ‘common’ widgets, but when I click ‘download’ they never download and nothing happens.
Leopard complaints don’t belong here. Reply to the right blog post.
http://widgets.yahoo.net/blog/?p=29
The old site didn’t have a link to the 3.x version either, FWIW.
Thanks for updating - hope its faster! A few suggestions; (1) larger preview lists (not just a small icon) - widgets is about visual appeal; (2) show new only option, revised only option (not new and revised together), (3) Download to destination and not only the “get it” - have stinkin mapped network drives so default doesn’t always work; (4) options should be intuitive - if you have to explain where to find/get these features you missed the target. (5) Put known bugs in a maintained list somewhere; not sure if its a macho thing or what but get over it. (6) good luck with the ads - think they stink but realize greenbacks needed.
I have to agree, the new site is not nearly as functional as the old. I liked seeing the widget in the view, now all I get is a description and a tiny icon that tells me nothing. Its a lot like the new widget widget that comes with the main program.. Its basically useless. If you can’t see the widget, you will not spend the time to download and open every new widget to see if you like the looks of it. Sorry to be blunt but the new look is totally non-functional.
I’m really disappointed. I can understand the drive to put the widgets at the front of the system, but there is nowhere that explains what the widgets are to be used with. I’m telling people that Konfabulator is fabulous, only to find that there is no where to actually download it anymore. Finding this (tiny little link at the bottom in the blur of country links) blog is not easy, and appears to be the only place to actually download Konfabulator! What?!
I just went through to download the “sample pack” so I could explain the process to those I was going to recommend come download the software. Unfortunately it appears to need admin access to my system to complete the download. Why? Why do some widgets when I try to download them with the “in page installer” also require an admin password to install? They don’t. And this is a serious breach of trust for something that doesn’t require being hooked into my system that I can’t see and where there is no explanation about why that level of secure access is required.
(I’m running OSX — and the vast majority of my applications do not need admin access.)
Have to agree with Steph, the new site just makes things harder to find what you want with just the small icon. Also agree with Simpson, the new interface for viewing widgets is non-functional. Way too much effort needed to search out something you might like to use. You basicially have to download it and try it, no other real way to tell. Bring back the old view of the widgets.
Where is the standalone installer so I can get the widgets I want running?
Are other widget developers suffering from lost data (votes and comments) as a result of the migration to the new site?
A vast majority of the comments and votes for my widgets are now missing. Also, all the comments that did make it over are dated on the date of the migration and NOT on the date they were made.
I don’t see a link to download the Yahoo Widget Engine anywhere. I already have it installed, but I want to download it to my USB key for installation on other computers. Why can I not do this? This new design is simply lacking in usability IMO.
Please revert to something similar to the old site.
This new site is has some issues:
1. Difficult to navigate
2. The button is not enough of a represention of the widget it represents (I have not downloaded a widget since the upgrade)
3. Not enough user set preferences (i.e. show 50 widgets per page)
4. The old format with a sort function would rock
Thanks!
Art
I don’t like the new design.
[…] We’re working on fixing the broken image (it’s broken for all new Widgets). It’s a nasty (and embarrassing) bug leftover from the brand-new site launched a while back. Oh, and if you don’t have it yet, you’ll need to download Yahoo! Widget Engine, available for both Mac and Windows. […]
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