yourminis - I can’t stop loving you
Coming back to flex888 after a long pause, I realize that my badmouth piece about yourminis is still on home page for this long. They did mess up my whole setting on my yourminis home page. However, reconstructing my tabs (pages) was such a smooth and enjoyable experience that I have to say yourminis is indeed still the role model of ALL Flash based new businesses. So far I can’t see any Flash site can this comfortably blend into the HTML/Javascript dominated web. Believe me, there are a lot Flash based startups now (I’ll start again to brag about them…)
The things they did right are:
- They take advantage all the beauties of Flash and the implemtation doesn’t fight with browser. Many Flash based web sites fall short here.
- They are on the landing page business. Lots of money has been floating around here.
- They are really into widget world. Widgeting is getting hotter and hotter in the web world and beyond. Most important, they set their widgets free! You can easily add widget to page online. See the blinking clock, it’s a yourminis widget (minis).
They are making improvement recently and more minis are added. Anyone who is seriously looking into new way of doing web development should seriously create and play around your yourminis pages.
There are things still missing though. Public API!
No need to preach about how important the API is. No API, no healthy ecosystem. Sharing tabs is not enough. Share-tag-pump is old. The whole web 2.0 is old actually. As good as yourminis could be, it’s time to think about how to stretch above and beyond.
The money is in enterprise. I think if yourminis can find a way getting into the Enterprise 2.0 place, their future will be much brighter. After the portal, CMS, SOA and such implementations, application portal built on top of them will become obvious needs. While many enterprises are still struggling with single sign-on and related issues, widget based application portal can just easily make those headache disappear.
What if yourminis can make their technology available as a application portal platform for enterprise?
What if yourminis starts providing API and Google DB alike backend?
What if people start building serious business applications using the API and database and providing SaaS applications, like what Saleforce.com’s AppExchange is doing?
I wish they are thinking what I’m thinking.
Leave a Comment
If you would like to make a comment, please fill out the form below.
http://www.youapp.com is an example of flash based startups.
Thanks for the positive writeup! Just to let you know, we are planning to make public a beta API within the next few weeks. It’s just about ready to go, just waiting to get the next release out before we open this up and invite people to the API beta group. The API will allow you to very easily create a widget that will run on the yourminis startpage, within the external web container (all of our minis can run outside the yourminis environment), and on the desktop using apollo (this will not be exposed until apollo is made public).
Let me know if you are interested and i’ll add you to the list of invites.
Thanks again for your support!
Hi, I’m one of the developers for yourminis. The good news is that we’re currently working on an API which should be released shortly. We’re also working on brining minis to your desktop via the Apollo platform. Yourminis as an enterprise portal platform is an interesting idea. It’s certainly not out of the realm of possibility. The Yourminis platform is in a constant state of evolution. It started as a module in our Goowy product and through several iterations over a very short period of time has evolved into what you see today. We’re still figuring out how and for what people use it and how and for what people want to use it. That being said, Yourminis was initially created as a consumer product but there is no real reason why it couldn’t be expanded to be used in enterprise situations.
H?mm interesting