Yahoo! acquires FoxyTunes
It was announced today that Yahoo! has acquired FoxyTunes, the company that develops FoxyTunes, a popular Firefox extensions that allows controlling virtually any media player from Firefox’s status bar.
During last year, FoxyTunes expanded its scope becoming also a music portal that integrates YouTube, Last.FM, amazon, Flickr, Yahoo! News and Yahoo! Music content related to the currently played song.
In fact, Yahoo! acquisition can be seen as an extension of this previous partnering: “We’ve been talking to the Yahoo! Music team about deepening our cooperation, and we quickly discovered that not only do they understand and appreciate what we’ve done with FoxyTunes, but they also share our vision of Universality and Openness”, reads the related blog post in FoxyTunes web site.
While “universality” and “openness” are not the first words that come to my mind when I think about Yahoo!, hopefully FoxyTunes acquisition is aligned with Yahoo! Music plans to go all DRM-free, as recently announced.
Are we seeing the start of a trend here? Not long ago, another popular extension, PDF Download, was acquired by Nitro PDF as a way to advertise its suite of PDF edition tools. And StumbleUpon remains as the poster boy of small projects born as Firefox extensions that make it big with users and commercially.
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February 4th, 2008 at 11:34 pm
So, how does this affect the chance that Yahoo will sell their company out to Microsoft or Google?
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February 5th, 2008 at 10:47 pm
Maybe there will finally be a way to play LaunchCast Radio on Firefox browsers now. But really, who cares? Foxytunes is just a space waster, and a multimedia keyboard is much more effective than trying to pick those little buttons. And Last.FM is so much better than LaunchCast Radio. And with the possibility of Microsoft acquiring Yahoo, this looks even less interesting.
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March 3rd, 2008 at 4:19 pm
This means that in a few weeks one of Firefox’s addons will be owned by Microsoft. Wonderful. Ah well not like I ever used FoxyTunes anyway - if I want media buttons I can use the media keyboard I have sitting :P
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