Yahoo and Google fight each other. Could they be friends?..

So, the Big Players are still fighting. Did the fight spread all over the floors already? Not really.

Ever heard about Yahoo!Go and their Mobile Widgets built on top of the Blueprint platform? How also about iGoogle and their Gadgets? Look, even the names chosen are different ...Widgets ...Gadgets.

However what if you don't care about the battles and just want to provide your content to the web-surfers in the compact form like those "X*gets"?

I was going to look around, decide on first platform, get first Dooblet X*get and try to re-use it on another X*get platform. And such a mash-up worked out!

1. Looking up

Well, first we've got to reveal some X*get platforms. If we're concerned with the size of target audience, then, perhaps, we could first think of Google, Yahoo and also consider some mobile giant like Nokia with its WidSets. What do we have to begin with?

• iGoogle Gadgets (dooblets)
  
• Blueprint from Yahoo! (dooblets)
  
• Nokia's WidSets (dooblets)

Let's check out the alternatives to above on dooblet.com. We'll spot some other options:

• Snaptu and
  
• Snipperoo.

iGoogle Gadgets - first I took a look at this one. From the very first glance it is complex enough to be a "mini-universe". One can born there, live there and also die there (not that I'd liked to). In addition, one gets nothing looking somewhat nice out-of-the-box. Even basic niceties should be designed on your own. And what if my efforts will not be accepted by the target audience?.. I've considered this for a second option.

Blueprint from Yahoo - as for a quick start this one looks much more attractive. Short XML files result in something not that bad looking X*gets!

Nokia's WidSets - light-weight? Hardly. It looked rather quite similar to iGoogle Gadgets complexity for the first glance. So I've decided to dive into it later.

Snaptu and Snipperoo - these go into my to-do list for a closer look later.

2. Decision

So, I've decided to start from scratch with Yahoo!'s Blueprint platform. My hope was to re-use things on iGoogle later.

3. Result

Just one day with Blueprint and my first widget has been ready and working! Look at Dooblet Widget built with Blueprint's XML declarative language.

But what about iGoogle? Can we re-use one day work and double the success? Yes, we can. Check out Dooblet as iGoogle's Gadget.

Here is the XML-file to inject the Blueprint gadget into iGoogle.

So we make friends Yahoo! and Google. 

:-)

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Some iGoogle's tabs make the widget look different, so if you experience some troubles with the mini-messages, just try to drag-n-drop the widget to another iGoogle tab.