

Why Marissa Mayer should acquire IFTTT and go all in on Yahoo Pipes - jfornear
http://jfornear.co/why-marissa-mayer-should-acquire-ifttt-and-go-all-in-on-yahoo-pipes/

======
newobj
Holy cow with the grandiosity of the title I would expect a master 5 year plan
about how Pipes will take over the world. Instead it's just another 'aggregate
my aggregators non-problem' that will be relevant to a fraction of a fraction
of nerds. Of course as soon as the value prop for the piped companies becomes
lower than the value prop for Yahoo they will simply turn them off. But that's
not to worry, because the value prop for the piped content will ALWAYS be
higher than for Yahoo. How exactly does one go "all in" on schlepping around
other people's content? Yahoo was in fact just that, to begin with...

~~~
jfornear
_> Holy cow with the grandiosity of the title I would expect a master 5 year
plan_

Thanks, I edited the post to include a chart from a PowerPoint I saw -- it
only projects the next 4 years though.

Seriously though, the goal of this post was to point out how current trends
are creating a user experience where Yahoo! Pipes is relevant.

~~~
whatusername
I think you need the re-examine the term "all in".

All In implies something like IBM with System/360. Spending more than annual
revenue (5,000,000,000? in 1960's - I can't find a great source for the actual
number)on a product line that still drives significant profit 40 years
later... That's all-in. Buying IFTTT so people can post tweets to Twitter and
App.net? Not quite in the same league.

~~~
nsfmc
the computer history museum provides:
[http://www.computerhistory.org/revolution/mainframe-
computer...](http://www.computerhistory.org/revolution/mainframe-
computers/7/161)

------
tommorris
The blog post doesn't make a compelling business case beyond "it'd be cool".
If Yahoo! were to buy IFTTT for the purpose of consolidating their mobile
experience (and I'm not even sure what that is supposed to entail), what's to
stop Twitter, Facebook and all that from turning their feeds into the service
off? Twitter have already pulled that kind of stunt.

Currently, IFTTT is a fun toy for hackers and power users who want to do
slightly off-the-wall mashups. If it got bought up and became a more critical
part of the infrastructure of a big company like Yahoo!, you can bet there'd
be some intervarsity tech company politics going on.

------
diego
This post does not deliver what it promises in the title. It gives no reason
why Marissa Mayer should acquire IFTTT. It's not particularly insightful
either.

I'm trying to guess why it has 53 votes. The only explanation I can come up
with is that there must be a number of IFTTT fans who upvoted it just because
it praises IFTTT. That would mean there is a high likelihood that this comment
would be downvoted.

~~~
emmett
I downvoted you just for the jab about "that will mean this gets downvoted".

~~~
diego
That is an idiotic reason for downvoting a comment. However, I wouldn't
downvote you if I could.

By the way, as the CEO of Justin.tv you may want to be more mindful of your
personal image. I wouldn't want to see comments like the above if I were your
investor or your employee.

~~~
jspthrowaway
> I wouldn't want to see comments like the above if I were your investor or
> your employee.

Why? He called you out and he's 100% correct, why would it matter who he is?
Personally, I think it speaks to his "personal image" that he doesn't give a
shit about your feel-good CEO image demands. There's also no shortage of
hilariousness that you think him taking a shot at you lowers his "personal
image"; no harm done for telling the truth, you just don't see it that way
because you're on the wrong end of it.

If I were shopping around for a company to invest in and I came across a
comment like that, I'd be _more_ likely to toss my money at him. You know why?
Because I know I'm dealing with a person, not someone repressing all personal
feelings and emotion to create this caricature of someone that they're really
not. A person like that is more invested in their failures and successes, and,
in my experience, is a better person to work for.

Becoming the leader of a company, as you know, is not a magic threshold after
which you have to change who you are. I wish we'd get over this ridiculous
assumption that we must hold people to a higher standard based on who they
are. It underlies pretty much all of politics, and makes it a newsworthy event
when Obama is seen drinking a beer. It's depressing.

~~~
diego
_"I wish we'd get over this ridiculous assumption that we must hold people to
a higher standard based on who they are."_

I agree that it would be nice, jspthrowaway. Unfortunately you, Emmett (whom
I've met in person), and I are not representative of all investors, employees,
user, or customers.

Emmett quoted me incorrectly, and made questionable use of the downvote button
(which comes with great responsibility, especially if you are a YC partner
like he is). To his credit he probably went back to work and forgot about this
thread.

~~~
jspthrowaway
> and made questionable use of the downvote button

In your opinion. I think it was right on target. Complaining about downvotes
is in the guidelines as something to be avoided, and predicting their onset is
a slightly differently colored shade of the same thing. It manipulates
peoples' reactions to your comment, and you are not at all oblivious to that.

I'm actually glad he told you why, even though it cost him karma. I wish every
downvote came with a reason.

> (which comes with great responsibility, especially if you are a YC partner
> like he is)

I laughed out loud at this. It's the downvote button, not a loaded gun.

I'll summarize.

The CEO of justin.tv, who you've met personally (as if that's important to the
issue at hand), downvoted you and you've gone after his personal image as a
result. Now you're citing his responsibility "as a YC partner" to act fairly.
Can we circle back toward you just not liking being downvoted eventually?

Your comment was so devoid of insight that the downvote jab at the end just
became icing on the cake, and I agree with it being called out. People upvoted
the article. It's a dumb article. Commenting on the people upvoting the dumb
article and characterizing them as mindless IFTTT fans is just noise, and this
entire thread which has now launched off from your noise is even more noise.

------
buro9
I know 3 startups trying to solve aggregation of metrics for analytics.

I worked for a management consulting company and produced such a system based
on aggregating data from across a global corporate network and producing
dashboards in SharePoint.

Yahoo could have an enormous impact on KPIs, dashboards and metrics for
consumers and business were they to want to. And with it, one hell of a
revenue stream.

IFTTT could solve data/metric aggregation for consumers, marketeers and other
less technical users.

And if an export from IFTTT could produce a Yahoo Pipe, then a developer (or
slightly more skilled user - a good Excel user perhaps) could then make it do
even more.

It could be used to read from Excel. From CSV. From SharePoint. From
databases. From web pages on the internet and intranet. Everything.

Aggregate news headlines concerning your company. Create cohort charts with
data from different and unconnected systems. Combine data from servers to
mailing list campaigns to observe impact much quicker and to identify fully
which campaigns work best. Or just grab the numbers from many systems to find
out which system is showing the wrong value.

So much is possible that companies struggle with today because their data is
siloed in disconnected systems... or some of it is external and they have no
interface to it.

Glue between Twitter and App.net? That's just trivial. A real prize will be to
aggregate anything and everything and allow it to be processed before
reporting on it.

It's not glamorous... but I can say from experience that the company I worked
for successfully sold the product I made for £50k licenses to large companies.
The demand is there.

~~~
rsync
"I know 3 startups trying to solve aggregation of metrics for analytics."

Get. Off. My. Lawn.

~~~
buro9
Not at all, I'm really excited by all of them. Particularly as they may make
this capability available to really small companies and consumers. I dislike
that this stuff is currently just a large enterprise capability.

------
mvkel
If something like Feedburner, (which was several orders of magnitude more
popular than Pipes and IFTTT combined) is forced to shutter, I don't think a
tiny service for power users is going to turn around a publicly traded company
as large as Yahoo. Call me crazy.

------
w1ntermute
> Will Twitter deprecate support for RSS to lock down our tweets? Will
> Facebook block IFTTT to control how we share our filtered photos?

I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if they did. Doubling down on Pipes with
Twitter heading in the direction it is right now would be a really stupid
move.

~~~
tlrobinson
The entire version 1.0 API will be turned off March 5, 2013. Version 1.1 only
has JSON, and more importantly requires authentication on every endpoint.

<https://dev.twitter.com/docs/api/1.1/overview>

So yeah, Twitter really doesn't want your data to leave their network.

~~~
Karunamon
Uh.... requiring authentication and using an industry standard communications
language is hardly what i'd call "not wanting your data to leave their
network".

------
randallu
So Yahoo should buy IFTTT to help people migrate from Twitter to App.net?

There are probably some good products to be built on integrated social
experiences (or internet glue), but Pipes+IFTTT doesn't sound like an actual
end-user product.

------
bslatkin
OP doesn't realize that big companies like Yahoo cannot sign API contracts;
they get terminated immediately. Remember Ping/Facebook?

I think the ToS termination issue is the single largest risk facing start-ups
operating in another company's ecosystem. How can Yahoo buy you if your API
key is deactivated as soon as the deal closes?

I love IFTTT, but I think their long-term prospects are bleak. Urban Airship
had the same problem.

------
thesash
If the market opportunity here is defragmentation of social networking, then
Yahoo should acquire Buffer[1], and get themselves a dead simple product that
"just works." IFTTT and Yahoo Pipes are awesome for technically savvy folks,
but it's a non-solution for the vast majority of the market.

[1] <http://bufferapp.com>

------
DigitalSea
This is hardly a convincing article for justifying why Yahoo! acquiring IFTTT
is a good idea. I get IFTTT is a great service, but it's nothing particularly
special, there's even a Rails clone of it on Github that Yahoo! could modify
and use to start their own IFTTT like service.

I am however an avid Pipes user and fan. It's definitely one of the strongest
tools Yahoo! have in its arsenal with exception for Yahoo! BOSS which I am
currently using for my new startup which relies on search engine data instead
of scraping it myself.

It was a nice try. I don't understand how this reached such a high spot on the
homepage.

------
23david
IFTTT and Yahoo Pipes are completely different products with different
business models. The customer excitement around IFTTT is great to see, but
IFTTT is still figuring out their business model, and they need to finish
development of their new platform and SDK. Once they get these things rolling
I can see them being an attractive acquisition target. But even then, I don't
see Yahoo Pipes and IFTTT co-existing nicely, and I'm not sure that Yahoo
would make sense as an acquirer.

------
kylemaxwell
I've no idea about the finances of it all, but in terms of usage, the two
services are a natural fit. IFTTT has easy integration with lots of services,
but Yahoo! Pipes has a lot more flexibility in terms of functions and logic.

That said, I'd like to see some sort of hosted version or library to do this.
Yes, you can do a lot of this yourself, but if the plumbing (hrrr) already
existed, you'd be free to focus on the actual logic instead of the
infrastructure.

------
kittxkat
That homepage design has to be the most distracting blog theme setting ever.

~~~
rossmiller
Only to be outdone by the swirly .gif avatar...

~~~
kittxkat
I don't really mind .gifs if used appropriate, like in this blog post of his
<http://jfornear.co/the-pinterest-layout-will-not-save-you> where he (imho)
also had a superior blog post design.

------
brainsqueezer
Yes, average user wants to do visual programming.

------
marcuspovey
I kinda feel sorry for Marissa Mayer, the internet collective has put a lot on
her.

I can see why, many great and well loved services have faced death by yahoo
over the years. Clearly people do still care about the future of yahoo (or at
least the services they consume) otherwise we wouldn't keep seeing these kind
of posts.

I just hope that there is a plan, and it would do much for me if MM made some
sort of statement to the effect that Yahoo will properly support acquisitions
rather than let them slowly die.

------
spullara
If the Pipes/YQL team that is still at Yahoo had any interest in duplicating
the functionality of IFTTT or Zapier, they could just do it.

------
roomnoise
I think about this a lot. Not just for my personal accounts but then add in
the pages and micro-brands one has to manage if you have a small business, or
a band, or just a blog you have an identity for. It becomes a juggling mess.

Ha, lets have an master service that manages user-created services on these
platforms. Then let Twitter play wack-a-mole with that...

------
BHSPitMonkey
A question I've always had about posts like this in general: What would happen
if Mayer actually did this? Would she not bet met with derision for apparently
guiding the company with advice gleaned from a blog post? Do "Company X should
do Y" articles actually hurt their own chances of being fulfilled?

~~~
001sky
The monday morning quarterback is a staple of the genre. This is the "pre-
game" version. =D No different, I suppose, a NY times Op Ed on XYZ political
policy. They are written to "influence" the lower members of the power
structure who surface ideas, not directly to the decisionmakers.
Decisionmakers (in general) are too busy doing other stuff.

------
bluetidepro
Nice article, however Yahoo! could probably figure out a way to ruin the
awesome UX IFTTT currently has. And with the track record Yahoo! has, I would
hope they wouldn't buy it. _Yahoo! is where good apps go to die. Haha_

~~~
iamdave
Flickr seems to be doing well.

~~~
zacharycohn
Flickr is in a holding pattern, and has been for years.

------
dudus
I miss the point. Of course if this setup becomes common they will block it as
well. They don't want you to do that. If you find a loophole they will fix
that.

------
smogzer
There is also <http://tarpipe.com> which is similar to ifttt but with a gui
more like yahoo pipes.

------
TopTrix
What if IFTTT acquire Yahoo! ? Now or then Yahoo! is going down and down. No
one depend on Yahoo!. We just use it as secondary platform.

------
seltzered_
my problem with ifttt: it does it's job just fine, so well I don't remember
the last time I logged into ifttt.

