The news this week about firing Carol Bartz, Yahoo’s CEO, made us go into the Wayback Machine to recall the many good things that Yahoo has created over its life. While there are many that are lining up to take shots at the Yahoos (certainly justified, including this mention of Bartz here), there are still some things worth noting that came out of Yahoo or that were touched by the company.
Some of Yahoo’s developer services were way ahead of their time, and sadly many of them are no longer with us:
- FireEagle (location services), one of the early geo-location services, before there was Foursquare and so many others. Still around, barely.
- Hadoop (Big Data) Yahoo initiated and put up some heavy investment in this project, since taken over by Apache. It is the go-to framework for big data and an integral part of Yahoo’s cloud businesses. Very much living and breathing.
- Delicious (tagging/shared bookmarks), one of the pioneers in tagging and early crowd sourced bookmarked recommendations of content, sold earlier this year to the founders of You Tube. Still here, but not top of mind.
- Yahoo Pipes (mashup tool), probably still one of the most useful development tools that anyone has ever invented. Pipes can manipulate RSS feeds and extract content from a variety of Web programming languages.
- Yahoo Query Language (programming language), a programming language that works across Web services, somewhat akin to what SQL does with databases. Still supported.
- BOSS (build your own search service), open search and data services platform that can use Yahoo’s search technology. Wait, you didn’t know that Yahoo has its own search technology? Just kidding.
- Blueprint (mobile site creation), it was an early effort in building mobile Web sites. Closed earlier this summer.
Yes, Yahoo was always a day late and a dollar short when it came to its webmailer, its IM client, and eventually its search service. But still, it has traffic. One Internet commenter said ” they should use their front page as a fire hose, projecting mainstream users onto these platforms” such as the ones mentioned above. Fair enough. And I still like their Yahoo Groups service, still the best free small business/community email list service around, although Google is trying to catch up with their own Groups offering. And while my Yahoo email inbox seems perennially spam-filled, their financial and movie pages are top-drawer.
Many comments around the ‘Net seem to label Yahoo as an engineering company that can’t get its products marketed or gain any adoption. One said “Yahoo lost its motivation, its excitement.” Now it is has lost its CEO. Maybe Bartz’ successor can see their way towards a better and more coherent future.
