
Developers: Never Mind the APIs, Here's YQL Execute - Anon84
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/theres_a_great_amount_of.php
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kingsley_20
I built one of the most popular pipes on Yahoo! pipes (the Social Media
Firehose - provides alerts from various social media searches for terms you
want to track). I spent _months_ trying to get in touch with someone, anyone
on the Y! platform team to see if I could turn it into a real app. No
response.

I'll build on the Yahoo platform when they agree to take the money from my
warm and willing hands.

PS: YQL & Exec are pretty sweet though.

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villageidiot
Mind if I ask which Pipe that was?

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kingsley_20
The "social media firehose":
<http://pipes.yahoo.com/update_maker/social_media_fire_hose> . It's usually
listed in the popular listings in the top-3 as "Update Maker", a sub-pipe now,
but was my first pipe.

The pipe times out pretty much most of the time these days. Sigh - another
indication of Y!'s platform commitment.

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villageidiot
Why did you ask their permission? Couldn't you just use the data from that
Pipe in an app without asking them?

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kingsley_20
the performance didnt live up to the demand -timeouts and 503s were frequent
when users subscribed to the feeds. I needed a plan for scaling and success
and i wanted to pay.

~~~
villageidiot
I'm surprised to hear they weren't giving Pipes enough horsepower. But maybe
it's a different story when a Pipe was as popular as yours. Still, your Pipe
has only had 500,000 runs in over a year. They should be able to handle that
many calls in a week.

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jpwagner
And yahoo's back in the game...

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SwellJoe
The thing is, Yahoo has been doing really great things for developers for
years now (YUI, BOSS, Hadoop contributions, etc., hell, Douglas Crockford
alone, by teaching us what JavaScript ought to look like, has done more for
JavaScript development than most whole web-related companies I can think of).
And they're _really_ generous with their licensing and usage terms. Google and
Facebook look downright stingy in comparison...I've never felt like I could
build something of lasting value on those platforms. I _would_ trust Yahoo
enough to build something on their platform, if I thought the board of
directors weren't going to do something stupid and force a sale to a less
enlightened company in the future.

But YQL is pretty brilliant. Takes "microformats" to a whole new level.

~~~
briansmith
A lot of people don't trust Yahoo because they willingly and actively
collaborate on governments' attempts at oppression, censorship, and privacy
invasion. I think Google is now making a farce of its "don't be evil"
marketing mantra, but at least they put up some resistance on some key issues.

Also, Yahoo was an advertising company first and a technology company second.
Google _was_ a technology company first and an advertising company second.
Now, they are the same, but those old perceptions exist.

Finally, there's a lot of FUD about whether Yahoo will even exist as a
seperate ongoing entity. If/when Yahoo can do something about it, the
community will be more willing to rely on it.

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SwellJoe
_A lot of people don't trust Yahoo because they willingly and actively
collaborate on governments' attempts at oppression, censorship, and privacy
invasion._

I think you'll need to provide references on this assertion. I'm not saying it
isn't true...but, do a "lot of people" really feel that way about Yahoo? I may
have missed the nerd bulletin that went out saying I'm not supposed to trust
them. All the people I know at Yahoo are good folks (likewise all the people I
know at Google).

That's not to say there aren't troubling events in both companies
histories...but I'm not really thinking people actively mistrust Yahoo. Or do
they?

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briansmith
I've never heard anything _good_ about Yahoo's ethics, but I've heard plenty
of _bad_ things from the tech press. Wikipedia is a pretty good place to
start:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo!#Criticism_and_controvers...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo!#Criticism_and_controversy).
I personally know developers that choose alternatives to Yahoo whenever
possible for ethical reasons. I personally know people who refuse to work for
Yahoo for ethical reasons. Are there a statistically significant number? I
don't know. But, I've never heard anybody claim that Yahoo is on any kind of
ethical high ground either.

Of course 99.9% of the people at Yahoo! are great people. But, historically,
the company's top management has failed ethically in very important cases.
And, their official policy (marketing message) on ethics is weak. Google's
marketing message on ethics is much stronger.

Keep in mind that while I think Google is _seen_ as a more ethical company, I
am not saying that one company actually _is_ better than the other. I'm only
talking about perception and the marketing messages that each company has put
out.

~~~
nostrademons
But you hear _bad_ things about nearly everything from the tech press. That's
their job: to hold your attention so they can sell advertising space. Negative
news grabs your attention more than positive news, so that's what the press
reports. And indignant moral outrage over the latest nefarious corporate
goings-on sells more papers(/banner ads) than anything else, so that's what
they report on.

In basically every organization I've worked for/with/in (except the financial
industry), the truth is basically 10-100x more benign than the media reports
it as. So unless you have personal experience with people in Yahoo or Google
that make you not trust them, don't believe everything you read in the media.

