Screw all of this Yahoo bashing
Before everyone declares Yahoo dead and irrelevant, we at Tabblo figured we’d throw a little support behind the company that has given us a whole bunch of help in getting this whole thing going.
I’m referring of course to the recent pile-on regarding the “leaked” memo declaring Yahoo lost, fat, and too thinly spread to be relevant penned by SVP Brad Garlinghouse. As one of the web’s venerable veterans, Yahoo is indeed facing a formidable set of challenges, but we should all take a moment to be clear on the fact that it would be a much worse world for all of us little startups if the big purple giant was to disappear. Here are some pretty concrete reasons why:
* when we got started back in May, we decided as a last minute thing to support Flickr integration. Actually, I sort of thought that we were going to end up not doing it because we really didn’t leave any time in the schedule for the work. But it was so easy every step of the way from getting the commercial API key to getting through their API that it just became a no-brainer. And still to this day we talk about how the early folks at Tabblo that Flickr sent us were absolutely key in getting us off the ground.
* when Yahoo released its Yahoo UI library, we (like many others who were frustrated with buggy versions of scriptaculous) jumped right on it. Incredibly well-documented and well-thought out, the YUI was a great help to our effort at building a re-usable and powerful UI that was truly cross-browser (and though we’ve since switched out a bunch of it for a home-grown, we still use it today).
Overall, Yahoo as a company is a good member of this ecosystem— and strategy woes notwithstanding— we should all try to remember that.
