#“Yahoo Kills Maps and OpenSources Sled/Postmile”
I gave up on Yahoo a long long time ago. The ultimate bungee VP company that came up with so many great products and ideas but followed through on almost none of them. I wouldn't touch any new Yahoo web-app with a long shitty stick because I know it'll be canned 12 months later.
The death of Yahoo Maps, once the absolute industry leader, is a case study in how Yahoo screws up. Brilliant piece on it over on Programmable Web.
But then, every once in a while, as with Pipes, Yahoo makes me smile and remember how "My Yahoo"was my home page for most of the 90s. It happened again last night with the Open Sourcing of Sled (and the rename to Postmile). You probably don't know Sled but I played around with it a bit over the summer. It was a very neat, very responsive, list-making tool. The reason I was trying it was that it was built using Node.js and our next project is doing the same.
The Google Groups post about it highlights the fact that Yahoo is still doing interesting stuff and doing virtual startups/skunkworks. The Open Sourcing of it is important for the Node community as there are very few complete end-to-end meaty sample Node Apps out there usingMongoDB, Express, Socket.IO, Jade, JS, HTML5 and OAuth that people can learn from. This will hopefully be a showcase for what's possible using the latest in web tech.
Whilst I am thrilled with the project going up on GitHub, the fact that they are killing it internally in Yahoo tells the same old story. What is the future for Yahoo?