Yahoo TV Widgets – A forgotten inspiration

January 9, 2009 in Technology & Science

Back in August I wrote a post on the announcement of Yahoo’s TV Widgets. I read today that Samsung and Yahoo have announced a partnership at CES 2009 to launch these internet widgets on the new Samsung HD TVs.

Source: ReadWriteWeb.comSource: ReadWriteWeb.com

It was only when I spotted this story that I realised that these widgets were the one first inspirations for the Micro-forums application.

Back in August I said

One interesting comment I read under the ReadWriteWeb article was a from somebody delighted at the thought of the twitter widget being at the bottom of his tv screen, so they could watch tv at the same time as their friends and have a kind of a group chat experience. E.g. “Peter says: ‘what a goal, that was amazing!” coming up at the bottom of your screen when you’re at home watching a football match! I think it’s really clever and could definitely create a new level of interactivity with what has always been a distinctly one-way medium.

I think that was the first seed planted in my mind which eventually lead to the idea of the live micro-forum. I signed up to the developer program back in August, Yahoo said they’d send out a mail when it was open to developers. No word yet, but if the Facebook application goes well that’s a definite potential avenue to grow it.

Yahoo’s TV Internet Widgets

August 21, 2008 in Technology & Science

I just saw this over on ReadWriteWeb. Basically, what Yahoo are planning to do is give people the chance to have widgets display at the bottom of their TV, kind of like a news ticker on Sky/BBC News, only these will be pulling directly from the internet and will be fully customisable!

Yahoo are also opening this up for anyone to make a widget that people can select to view on their TV’s. Some examples proposed so far have been news tickers, weather updates etc. One interesting comment I read under the ReadWriteWeb article was a from somebody delighted at the thought of the twitter widget being at the bottom of his tv screen, so they could watch tv at the same time as their friends and have a kind of a group chat experience. E.g. “Peter says: ‘what a goal, that was amazing!” coming up at the bottom of your screen when you’re at home watching a football match! I think it’s really clever and could definitely create a new level of interactivity with what has always been a distinctly one-way medium.

I really can’t wait to see what widgets get made for this. What does anyone else hope to see? Or does anyone else plan on having a go at making a widget or two? (I may give it a bash myself!) I think some sort of RSS headline reader could be useful, or maybe an Alarm widget, that reminds you to do stuff, or what TV show’s are on, when you’re watching TV.