Earlier this year Yahoo announced that the Yahoo Blueprint Platform was being extended from several hundred mobile devices in several thousand. Now the company has opened it up to third party developers.
The BluePrint is a platform on which developers can create mobile websites. It uses simple XML, and is the same technology Yahoo used to build oneSearch and the Yahoo.com mobile home page.
“This is a huge step for the platform offering, since it makes your mobile sites available to potentially every user, regardless of which phone they are using,” says the company. “A mobile site developed with Blueprint can now be displayed with an wonderfully rich UI not only on iPhones, the Palm Pre, Windows Mobile phones or Series 60 3rd edition phones, but also at the same time – without you having to change any code – on amazingly popular devices (think Blackberry Curve, Nokia N70, Blackberry Pearl, and even the Motorola RAZR V3i) that do not come with highly sophisticated browsers.”
Here are some examples of the same Blueprint-created page on different devices (courtesy of Yahoo):
Sony Ericsson W810i
iPhone:
Blackberry 8800
Palm Treo 650 (Palm OS)
While Yahoo Blueprint supports most mobile devices, the company says there are some exceptions. These are mainly limited to handsets that only support WML pages, can’t handle or support images, or have strong memory restrictions.
With Blueprint, developers can keep their own domain names and get user statistics via the Blueprint Management Portal. More information can be found here, and at the Blueprint DevCenter here.
