Yahoo Continues To Embrace This Openness Thing. Ebay Widget On Yahoo Home Page

Yahoo appears to be quite serious about openness and promoting third party content and applications on their massively visited home page. Today they’re announcing the addition of an eBay widget to the new Yahoo home page, which is still being tested with just a subset of Yahoo users. The widget will be added to the My Applications dashboard area on the left.

eBay users can use the widget to monitor buys and sells, check recent bids and get reminders about auctions that are about to close. They can also search listings without leaving Yahoo.

Yahoo, like AOL, has made a subtle but important shift in their home page strategy. In the old days the home page linked out to other Yahoo pages, or advertisers. Now they’re willing to provide content that users want on the home page, no matter the source. The fact that users can access this eBay widget, presumably without eBay paying a sponsorship fee of any kind, shows Yahoo is willing to put users above revenue (in the hope that happy users will mean more revenue down the road).

By the way, Yahoo sure does love Southwest Airlines. Every screen grab they supply the press with has a big fat Southwest ad in it.