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Comment by peteforde | Hacker News Reader

I was at the O'Reilly Emerging Tech conference session that functioned as (what I remember to have been) the Pipes launch party. Everyone involved with the project seemed young and full of optimism, and while they didn't know exactly how Pipes would make money, I remember being as impressed with the UI as I was the forward-thinking ideas that motivated the project. Keep in mind that in 2006, IE 6 was still omnipresent so the fact that they had a usable drag and drop interface running put it in rarified air along with other UX trailblazers like Flickr and DabbleDB.

To this day, I am still bewildered and not just a little angry about how Yahoo's entire M&A machine was really just a catch-and-kill trap for taking the most promising ideas out of the ecosystem and slowly resource starving them into irrelevance.

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I remember that ETech. Back when Yahoo was doing a bunch of things that were cool and not profit-driven, like FireEagle.

In a lot of ways that tech was all ahead of its time. It's a shame the monetization schemes weren't similarly evolved. If it were, Yahoo may still be more relevant today.

I met one of the FireEagle devs there, at the same ETech event, and he was a really great person. We proceeded to bump into each other a few more times over the years, specifically at the Ajax Experience conferences. He really tried to convince me that Yahoo wasn't all that bad, although he eventually did have to move on.

As evidenced by the previous paragraph, I've forgotten his name which makes it exceptionally difficult to reconnect.

Consider this a HN "missed connections" attempt. ;)

Possibly Tom Coates?

Damn, that is a great guess that is so close it hurts: you've made me confident that I'm mis-remembering enough to think I'm actually talking about the FireEagle launch event. The Pipes demo was a different session, possibly a year or two earlier.

Either way, the person I am doing a laughably poor job of describing was at the FireEagle event but I definitely remember him being a peer/coworker of Tom's - he wasn't the center of attention that day.

Sigh.

Maybe check Tom's leaving-Yahoo post? There's a paragraph listing a bunch of the devs:

"So I want to personally thank Seth Fitzsimmons, Samantha Tripodi, Jeannie Yang, Chris Martin, Ben Ward, Kevin Ryan, Phil Pearson, Rabble, Arnab Nandi, Simon King, Mor Naaman, Ayman Shamma and everyone else who worked on Fire Eagle at any point in its life. I learned an enormous amount from all of you."

http://plasticbag.org/archives/2010/05/my_last_day_at_yahoo

You're more than likely thinking of Seth Fitzsimmons: https://twitter.com/mojodna

> UX trailblazers like Flickr and DabbleDB.

And Meebo! They build an entire windowing system in the browser...and supported IE6.

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