Why Yahoo! bought Pixoria

Phil Wainewright writes: “I have a feeling though that Yahoo! realizes exactly how powerful this technology could be. Imagine building AJAX capability into Yahoo! Widgets, so that a widget could directly query an XML source for specific data, exactly as browser-based AJAX applications like Google Suggest have been doing. To the chagrin of some users, Pixoria hasn’t prioritized this in the past, but in a longstanding thread on this topic in the company’s discussion forum, company founder Arlo Rose disclosed last month that, “SOAP and XML-RPC are on our roadmap. Can’t tell you when they’ll show up though… but hopefully sooner rather than later.” The timing of that revelation, especially when put together with Tony Schneider’s comments above, tells me that Yahoo! fully intends in due course to promote Widgets as a user-friendly desktop front-end to enterprise-class web services applications.”