6 ms·

Why Marissa Mayer should acquire IFTTT and go all in on Yahoo Pipes

121 points by jfornear 14y ago

kylemaxwell 14y ago
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.
dudus 14y ago
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.
bluetidepro 14y ago
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 14y ago
  Flickr seems to be doing well.
  - zacharycohn 14y ago
    Flickr is in a holding pattern, and has been for years.
  - incongruity 14y ago
    What, exactly, is flickr doing? Best answer I have is: coasting.
kittxkat 14y ago
That homepage design has to be the most distracting blog theme setting ever.
- rossmiller 14y ago
  Only to be outdone by the swirly .gif avatar...
  - kittxkat 14y ago
    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 http://jfornear.co/the-pinterest-layout-will-not-save-you where he (imho) also had a superior blog post design.
randallu 14y ago
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.
newobj 14y ago
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...
- suyash 14y ago
  I know right, I wonder why we keep falling for these posts, they are not worth #2 on HN
  - wslh 14y ago
    It is the "hacker new singularity". I saved this story just for my interest on the HN comments!
    - icebraining 14y ago
      That's what bookmarks are for, though.
      - wslh 14y ago
        It as an answer to the parent comment. Don't know how to take your comment (and your downvote?)
        icebraining 14y ago
        (and your downvote?) No. Parent was disagreeing with all the downvotes this story had, and you said you had 'saved' (which, in HN, means you had to upvote, since that's the only way to add a story to the saved list) this story because of the comments. So my point was that instead of upvoting to save the story, you could've just bookmarked it.
mvkel 14y ago
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 14y ago
> 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 14y ago
  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 https://dev.twitter.com/docs/api/1.1/overview So yeah, Twitter really doesn't want your data to leave their network.
  - Karunamon 14y ago
    Uh.... requiring authentication and using an industry standard communications language is hardly what i'd call "not wanting your data to leave their network".
tommorris 14y ago
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.
buro9 14y ago
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.
- iamdave 14y ago
  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. Telerik?
  - buro9 14y ago
    No. But a few of our clients did use their web parts for dashboard. What I build was an assortment of plugins to products (Project Server, Excel for SharePoint, SharePoint) as well as some simple scrapers (HTML, XML and CSV from web sites and windows shares). These were either event triggered or attached to timers. Data was extracted from all of the backend systems and then deposited in a local database, and the local databases (usually office or department specific) were then rolled up nightly to produce the HQ view of all of this data. Finally, that data was dumped into OLAP cubes and surfaced through reporting web parts into SharePoint so that people could slice and dice however they wanted. And now think of what IFTTT and Yahoo Pipes can do. Right, so they're just missing a reporting layer to act on the output of all of that, potentially a database if they want to add trending.
23david 14y ago
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.
thesash 14y ago
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 http://bufferapp.com
roomnoise 14y ago
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...
brainsqueezer 14y ago
Yes, average user wants to do visual programming.
smogzer 14y ago
There is also http://tarpipe.com http://tarpipe.com which is similar to ifttt but with a gui more like yahoo pipes.
BHSPitMonkey 14y ago
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 14y ago
  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.
diego 14y ago
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 14y ago
  I downvoted you just for the jab about "that will mean this gets downvoted".
  - diego 14y ago
    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.
    - hnriot 14y ago
      I'd suggest also that maybe he would be better off fixing his website. From my iPad where I click any of the links in the footer I get a 404, here's the about link as an example: http://www.justin.tv/static/iphone_promo#/p/about_us http://www.justin.tv/static/iphone_promo#/p/about_us
    - jspthrowaway 14y ago
      > 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.
bslatkin 14y ago
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.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
seltzered_ 14y ago
my problem with ifttt: it does it's job just fine, so well I don't remember the last time I logged into ifttt.
spullara 14y ago
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.
DigitalSea 14y ago
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.
marcuspovey 14y ago
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.
TopTrix 14y ago
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.

121 points by jfornear 14y ago

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.

dudus 14y ago

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.

bluetidepro 14y ago

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 14y ago
Flickr seems to be doing well.
- zacharycohn 14y ago
  Flickr is in a holding pattern, and has been for years.
- incongruity 14y ago
  What, exactly, is flickr doing? Best answer I have is: coasting.

kittxkat 14y ago

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

rossmiller 14y ago
Only to be outdone by the swirly .gif avatar...
- kittxkat 14y ago
  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 http://jfornear.co/the-pinterest-layout-will-not-save-you where he (imho) also had a superior blog post design.

randallu 14y ago

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.

newobj 14y ago

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...

suyash 14y ago
I know right, I wonder why we keep falling for these posts, they are not worth #2 on HN
- wslh 14y ago
  It is the "hacker new singularity". I saved this story just for my interest on the HN comments!
  - icebraining 14y ago
    That's what bookmarks are for, though.
    - wslh 14y ago
      It as an answer to the parent comment. Don't know how to take your comment (and your downvote?)
      - icebraining 14y ago
        (and your downvote?) No. Parent was disagreeing with all the downvotes this story had, and you said you had 'saved' (which, in HN, means you had to upvote, since that's the only way to add a story to the saved list) this story because of the comments. So my point was that instead of upvoting to save the story, you could've just bookmarked it.

mvkel 14y ago

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 14y ago

> 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 14y ago
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 https://dev.twitter.com/docs/api/1.1/overview So yeah, Twitter really doesn't want your data to leave their network.
- Karunamon 14y ago
  Uh.... requiring authentication and using an industry standard communications language is hardly what i'd call "not wanting your data to leave their network".

tommorris 14y ago

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.

buro9 14y ago

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.

iamdave 14y ago
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. Telerik?
- buro9 14y ago
  No. But a few of our clients did use their web parts for dashboard. What I build was an assortment of plugins to products (Project Server, Excel for SharePoint, SharePoint) as well as some simple scrapers (HTML, XML and CSV from web sites and windows shares). These were either event triggered or attached to timers. Data was extracted from all of the backend systems and then deposited in a local database, and the local databases (usually office or department specific) were then rolled up nightly to produce the HQ view of all of this data. Finally, that data was dumped into OLAP cubes and surfaced through reporting web parts into SharePoint so that people could slice and dice however they wanted. And now think of what IFTTT and Yahoo Pipes can do. Right, so they're just missing a reporting layer to act on the output of all of that, potentially a database if they want to add trending.

23david 14y ago

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.

thesash 14y ago

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 http://bufferapp.com

roomnoise 14y ago

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...

brainsqueezer 14y ago

Yes, average user wants to do visual programming.

smogzer 14y ago

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

BHSPitMonkey 14y ago

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 14y ago
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.

diego 14y ago

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 14y ago
I downvoted you just for the jab about "that will mean this gets downvoted".
- diego 14y ago
  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.
  - hnriot 14y ago
    I'd suggest also that maybe he would be better off fixing his website. From my iPad where I click any of the links in the footer I get a 404, here's the about link as an example: http://www.justin.tv/static/iphone_promo#/p/about_us http://www.justin.tv/static/iphone_promo#/p/about_us
  - jspthrowaway 14y ago
    > 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.

bslatkin 14y ago

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.

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

seltzered_ 14y ago

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

spullara 14y ago

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.

DigitalSea 14y ago

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.

marcuspovey 14y ago

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.

TopTrix 14y ago

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.