Yahoo has added another one of my favorite sites to their service – first Flickr, now they have announced the acquisition of Konfabulator. And best of all – it’s now FREE!

Konfabulator is a Windows/Mac tool to allow users to run small mini-apps (called Widgets). The company was created by former Apple employee Arlo Rose, and preceeded the Tiger Dashboard by several years. It remains my favorite over Dashboard – as it has a simply amazing catalog of user-created widgets, and best of all the apps remain on-screen at all times, easily accessible from a menubar icon or expose-like function key reveal feature.

Frankly, I keep one of my two office monitors cluttered with widgets. I’ve got several webcams on there, rotating through radar images, a local Atlanta TV station towercam (all via the WebImages widget). I have Hong Kong, San Fran, Denver, Atlanta and London wall clocks (WorldClockPro). I also have a minicalendar, a couple of spiffy uptime/cpu usage monitors, a weather warning widget, and a great widget called the iTunes Companion. If I play a song w/out album art, it fetches it and installs it in the MP3. Sweet!

I had paid for Konfabulator (it used to be a nag-ware product) for the Mac a couple of years back. When the PC version came out, I was bummed to discover that my existing SN wouldn’t work on the new version – I’d have to pony up cash for the PC independent of the Mac. This past weekend, I was actually considering a purchase for the PC – but Y! made that decision a bit simpler.

Anyway, it’s great news that Yahoo has seen this as a product to spread via their considerable market reach. The PR indicates that they saw value in using Konfabulator as a means to extend access to Yahoo’s APIs. Seems like another in a series of major portals buying a pay service and setting it free. Google’s Maps/Earth (Keyhole) and Picasa are just two examples…

Links:
Konfabulator’s letter to the community
Slashdot reports on the purchase
Om Malik breaks the news about Pixoria’s buyout
PaidContent.org on the new business model