bruno fernandez-ruiz

I had a quick go at Yahoo!’s new pipes product. Yahoo! pipes is an aggregator product (not intended for end-consumers) to visually program/constract feed aggregators from any sources. It looks complex as a consumer concept, and it is, but it’s actually really easy to use as a programming tool. It took me less than 5 minutes to create a feed aggregator for stock news.

It would be really interesting now if the aggregated feed results (”pipe output”) could be mashed up into other sources, like Yahoo! Maps, etc. using GeoRSS, KML or alike. That would then become a true consumer product!

Update: It seems like Yahoo! pipes got clogged. The site was brought down a few hours ago due to excessive demand. It received more attention that originally envisaged! Well, that’s a good thing. I hope it comes back soon.

Update: The service is back up.

Skype asked me yesterday to upgrade last night to the final 3.0 (I use Skype for video conferencing because of its ability to go through firewalls by tunneling on port 80). So having run the beta for over 3 months now, I thought it would be a good idea. During the install I was prompted to whether I wanted the Google toolbar installed, at which point I stopped the install and uninstalled Skype (I hate when install programs creep with toolbars, and all other sort of rubbish plugins that I did not ask for).

But what is Ebay’s strategy by shipping a competitor’s product? Google merchant was born to compete directly with Paypal, which I am sure Ebay’s executives did not receive too well. However, not far later in summer Ebay signed a large multi-year advertisement deal with Google. Buried in that press release, an announcement that Google Talk creeps into Skype. And now Skype ships with Google Toolbar.

Google has definitely won a lot: extend its messenger network, sell advertising, and get the toolbar distributed. But Ebay?

Well, Ebay’s strategy is probably to focus on their core auction business, and use the other products as channels to bring in further revenue to the auctions (they see Skype as a tool to increase their market share in the auction business). Skype direct revenue from SkypeOut and SkypeIn is peanuts in comparison with Ebay’s auction business. And in that context, any sort of interoperability, which would include Google Talk, is welcome.

All great as a concept, but why pick Google?

Ebay would have been better picking an advertising channel from a non competitor, such as Yahoo! With Yahoo! they would have obtained the advertisement network, the toolbar, the Yahoo! IM (a true IM player, unlike Skype). All I know is that I won’t be buying any EBAY stock any time soon.

Apple has made significant (relative) intakes into the OS business. I mean, wow, Apple is cool. I like the Aqua looks, the whole iPod culture (which to be true is the one making Apple popular — I even bought a pink mini for my daughter Anaïs). But a mouse with one button? Hell … if a command line guy like me is really desperate to get a mouse, he certainly won’t be getting a mouse without a middle button, not to talk about a mouse with a single button! I still think the single coolest feature in X11 for donkey years has been the middle button. Anyway, I am digressing.

So, yeah, cool and everything, the scripting kiddies loving their Macs, big marketing and communications machine, but Apple has failed to think beyond Vista and NeXT, and not only that, it has messed up the whole BSD kernel rendering every single Mac OS out there as insecure as Windows OS. Well done boys.

I hate information locking and since I am paying for virtual private hosting I thought I would move out of blogger. I also changed the layout significantly, and used a theme by Neil Merton.