Sweet!

I am convinced this is absolutely the right direction for Yahoo!. However in order for all their Open Services to sink in and permeate the web, their products have to be the absolute best in their class. A tough challenge, especially since there are so many competitors offering excellent products and APIs.

Here is a huge list of all their Open Web Services and APIs for developers [developer.yahoo.com].

In quite a few of these arenas (like Finance, Flickr, Pipes), Yahoo already are best of show. In others (Search, Social, Maps), they have a lot of catching up to do; even if their technology is comparable (like Maps) they're way behind in popularity. For many of those services, you can find a better-established product offering the same thing... For some, there are dozens of players on the field.

They're competing with Google Maps, OpenID, OpenSocial, Mootools, Dojo, Hotmail, Live Messenger, Facebook, Digg, Feedburner, Expedia, Monster, Google Search.... all at once.

ref: Kill Bill, the Bride vs. the Crazy 88

Don't mean to hijack the thread, but I find working with Pipes really annoying (UI could be improved a lot, esp navigating on the grid) and at the same time strangely addictive.

I keep getting the idea that there will be some huge reward at the end of the tunnel once I grok the hairy details (hope it's not a pipe dream). Right now, I trying to extract parts of my own data and feed them to Yahoo to be translated - and then grab the pipes rss output to merge it back in with AJAX. Seems to work great when translating to one language, but not so easy to do more than one simultaneously...

It'd be nice to have some conditional processing capability in the translation tool, rather than having to split and process individually - makes for some tangled plumming.