Are you like me? Do you get upset every time the veil of technology is lifted and a once difficult (or tedious) process becomes easier for the masses? It must be some sort of character flaw, but it really disappoints me and sometimes it even pisses me off.
I will probably file this one more under disappointed than pissed off.
It used to be a little more difficult to grab feeds from other sites, parse them out, and spit out the data as usefull information that just happened to help your site rank well in the search engines. Yahoo Pipes makes much of this easier. Maybe it makes my job easier and I can focus on a new level of control over the data and content. Pull it all together and spit it out with a better mousetrap. We shall see. My hunch is that it will help the webmaster who doesn’t have a great deal of coding experience but wants to put up another worthless MFA (made for Adsense) site.
Please note, I am not calling MFA sites worthless. I am categorizing the expected result of easy feed integration and expecting many people to attempt to enter the game with worthless sites. A scrape, an rss, post site and make money, right? “That is what the eBook that I bought on Ebay said.”
Who will adopt and use Yahoo Pipes? Will it be the masses or users of myYahoo? Will it be the blog community (this could be the big market)? Will it be coders and SEO’s who now find that their job becomes easier?
Were you one of the many who weren’t able to use Pipes in the first couple of day? It must be very difficult to gauge the demand for a new product like this. As a developer on the inside of a company the size of YHOO, it must be daunting to learn that your product will end up on the Yahoo home page. Is there a way to gauge the level of traffic that will come. How about the amount of traffic that you can anticipate from all of the press. It has been so long since Yahoo was out in front and not introducing an “also ran” product that they might have forgotten what comes of it.
On the business front, and an owner of some YHOO stock, I was surprised to see Yahoo get out in front on a new tool. This is great news and perhaps an attempt by Terry Semel to rule with less of an iron fist and start listening to the developers rather than the marketers. Who knows. Semel is not exactly on firm footing at Yahoo. He needs to shake things up and I hope that this is the first of many announcements and products. Even if they piss me off!
PS: Is Pipes crashing Firefox for anyone else?