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Comment by yeukhon | Hacker News Reader

I think Yahoo is simply too quiet. To be honest the only thing that keeps popping up these couple years about Yahoo were

* email

* Fantasy Sport

* Flickr

* Yahoo Finance

* Mayer

* Tumblr

* Alibaba sale

The first four have existed for years. I bet a lot of Tumblr users don't even know Yahoo owns Tumblr now. Yahoo search is probably getting more notice given now Yahoo search is Firefox's default search engine (at least that's the case in North America).

Yahoo has some great ideas like the Digest app and doing some great mobile and streaming products, but I don't use them, and I don't always hear my coworkers and my friends talking about Yahoo (well except my friends who are working for them, but they are still pretty quiet about what they are working on).

Maybe their Yahoo Original series will catch on some fire.

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I liked Yahoo pipes, but they're super limited compared to IFTTT

Pipes is a dead product, it's just waiting for someone to remember to turn off the light. Even in 2011 it was on life support.

It's a great example of how even when Yahoo hits on something interesting, they will neglect it and fail to profit from it. Instead IFTTT launches 4 years later and gets a $170mm valuation.

> Pipes is a dead product

It totally is. Is there something that can rise from the ashes or was it just a waste?

At least when I was at Yahoo (many years ago), there was zero apparent desire to even continue to operate in that type of service space. I guess Yahoo wants to be a media company and sell ads, not provide APIs to do nerd stuff for free.

I would look to Zapier or IFTTT instead. I haven't used Zapier, but the fact that they actually charge money (shocking!) gives me hope. Maybe they can actually build a business around it.

I have never used Yahoo pipes, but I found IFTTT to be quite limited when I tried it earlier this year. There are no booleans, pipeline control, arguments, scheduling, reuse, etc. I know this tool wasn't written for me, but these are things that I would derive real value from.

I want visual tools at a level just above a scripting language, hosted on a managed platform I can largely ignore. An API for webhooks and oauth, 3rd party API support, triggers that can run custom javascript or python... I'd pay all the money for that.

To confirm your point - my blog has been on Tumblr for years and I just now discovered the Yahoo connection by reading this article.

And Community Season 6!

This is the first Yahoo! endeavor I've engaged in since their original directory. I'm glad they picked it up, but it's not clear they have any velocity with the rest of Screen.

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