Designed to become a more open and accessible platform, Yahoo! has released Yahoo! Widgets version 4.5. Although it has maintained the look and feel on desktops, it has several technical improvements and new partnerships.

Yahoo! has teamed up with NBA All-Stars for the NBA All-Star Ballot Widget and RockYou Widget for creating and watching photo slideshows.

For many widget users, this site has a new At-a-Glance view so they can easily search the highest rated, most downloaded, and newest widgets available in the Yahoo! Widgets Gallery.

Moreover, users can now share these widgets to other people through IM, and email. They can also share these widgets via Digg, Reddit, and del.icio.us.

As far as widget developers are concerned, Yahoo! Widgets now supports HTML and Flash-based widget designs. Additionally, it has new rich-media capabilities like videos to help create better widgets.

Get the full details at Widgets team blog.

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