YAHOO BUYS PIXORIA, MAKER OF KONFABULATOR

Yahoo continues to be active in acquisitions. More from SiliconBeat:

Yup. Yahoo has acquired Pixoria, maker of a scripting application called Konfabulator that allows people to run mini desktop applications called widgets. These tiny apps can perform simple tasks or put content from the web on their desktops. (Think alarm clocks, calculators, RSS feeds from favorite sites.). Apple has helped mainstream the concept of widgets with its new operating system Tiger. But Pixoria was doing widgets first, and Konfabulator runs on both Macs and Windows.

What does Yahoo want with widgets? It's content and services on your desktop, for starters.

"It's really an exciting new distribution channel for Yahoo," said Toni Schneider, vice president of the Yahoo Developer Network, and co-founder of another start-up recently bought by Yahoo, Oddpost. "It's perfect for the kinds of things where you don't want to be constantly going back to a web page, like your portfolio for example. To have it there on your desktop just constantly updating and easily glance-able is a really important new distribution channel." (full post)

UPDATE: My friend, Jeff, emailed me to try it out if I haven't. I haven't so I did. It's very cool. Check out Konfabulator here.

UPDATE II: I checked out a fair amount of "widgets" in the Konfabulator platform and it's very cool. Reminds me of my old Mac days when I would download and use various utility add-ons.