Yahoo has made headlines from its new mobile strategy, announced this week at CES. The details have been widely reported (see here), but the announcement is particularly interesting to me because it is the first attempt by a major internet player to provide a general purpose widget API designed specifically for the mobile phone environment. Yahoo has been having its lunch eaten by Google of late, and this is its latest bid to secure mindshare in the rapidly growing mobile space.

Unlike the Google Android mobile OS, which competes with other mobile OS makers such as Windows, RIM (Blackberry), Symbian (Nokia) and Apple (iPhone), Yahoo’s offering – called Go 3 – is not hardware specific. To the contrary, it is a mobile developer platform that aims to hide the daunting jungle of mobile environments from application developers by providing a single development environment that will work on a majority of existing phones. Firms such as Openwave Systems, Callwave, Zumobi, Flurry and Mobio Networks also cater to mobile developers, but do not have the same broad base of existing users that Yahoo does.

And, while Go 3 is clearly meant to promote Yahoo’s own search services, the company has resisted the content owner conundrum and promised to allow competing services (search and other) to create applications within its environment. Some of the first widgets available include an eBay bid tracker, a mini-MySpace client that offers a small number of basic features such as adding friends, status updates, and commenting on photos, and an MTV News widget that delivers the latest entertainment stories and lets users search for albums and artists from their cell phones.

This is an expected and natural extension of the recent moves by Facebook and Google to open their social networks to application developers. Still, as the first mobile-centric version of the widget vision, it deserves special mention. And if it performs as advertised, it will provide value. The mobile phone is the next great Internet frontier, but it poses challenges to application developers due to the limited screen size, awkward pointing devices, and less advanced broadband networks. Yahoo’s offering is designed to make it easier for the developer by masking these complexities. The current list of supported phones includes 270 different models, and Yahoo claims that more are to come.

Among other things, it compensates for the inability of many mobile phones to support scripting necessary for cool Ajax-like interfaces by moving this processing to its own servers (browser -based scripts consume up to 5 times more battery power). It also provides a common context for browserless applications – termed widgets or snippets – within its “carousel” user interface. The Go 3 developers guide expains:

• A Widget is an application with customized layouts that appears on one or more separate screens. Users can add published Widgets to their My Widgets page by selecting them from the Widget Gallery. Users also have the option of adding Widgets to the Yahoo! Go carousel for faster access.
• A Snippet is a “mini Widget” that appears on Yahoo!’s mobile home page and on the Yahoo! Go Home Widget, and can extend onto a separate screen. Snippets share a standard layout, with Yahoo! navigation aids framing the screen; they can link to Widgets and to external Web sites.

This is all very new, and much of it it is still vaporware. But it provides an exciting glimpse of the future to come. And in case you missed it, the discussion has moved from walled gardens to open applications with hardly any fanfare. Now that’s progress!