14 DAY TRIAL // Yahoo granted several patents that reveal some of the Sunnyvale company's plans that might bring a special sidebar for some of the giant portal's solutions. Although it's not quite clear what products would be included in the sidebar program, the Abstract part of the patent reveals that the new Yahoo utility might be compatible with photo sharing websites (Flickr), social networking pages and even community pages. Basically, a potential sidebar would be useful for the users who want to stay up-to-date with the latest comments made on their blog, recently received emails or latest photos uploaded on a profile.
"Members of Internet community websites, such as for example, social networking sites, photo sharing sites, review site, and other community sites, regularly make updates to the websites. Therefore a member of those sites is constantly checking those sites for new updates. an application module of a sidebar provides an indicator, such as, for example, a new item in the application module, to the sidebar user when an update is made to a community website by another member of the site," the Abstract part of the "Community information updates in a sidebar" patent says.
According to SEO by the Sea, the sidebar would also work with Yahoo 360 and might be able to provide search engine alerts and instant messaging notifications. Personally, I see this new Yahoo utility similar with the ones implemented into Yahoo Widgets Engine but it's not impossible to implement a web-based sidebar that can be posted on pages and blogs.
The same source says that all the patents were filed in 2006 and granted last week but the Sunnyvale company refused to make any comments about them. However, we should expect for some big surprises from the giant portal because the company was quite reticent in the recent period when it came to new products and ideas.