Salim Ismail isn’t afraid of getting burned. One reason is because he knows what’s hot. Not like Paris Hilton knows what’s hot, but like the head of Brickhouse at Yahoo! knows what’s hot. Salim is helping drive innovation at Yahoo through Brickhouse, the newly launched program for rapid product development. He uses a team to evaluate cool ideas from within the company, brings them in to Brickhouse, and builds them up.
The first hot product to come out of Brickhouse is Pipes, a product Tim O’Reilly calls, “a milestone in the history of the internet.”
Pipes is basically an editor for structured data and RSS feeds. So you can combine many feeds into one, and remix your favorite data sources and use the Pipe to power a new application. It’s the first way for non-programmers to mash up data on the web creating new ways to see only the information they want.
One of the hottest Pipes on the site is New York Times through YouTube, where headline keywords from The Times home page are mashed up with video from YouTube that is relevant to those key words. The results turn up anything from a fake video on President Clinton’s Last Days In Office, to early game show clips of The Price is Right.
When Salim isn’t busy building great new products, you can find him on his blog, You’ve Got Ismail, discussing new technology, his latest venture, or just cool stuff he likes. But at Web Content 2007, he promises to give us two fabulous chances to hear what he has to say. He is presenting on Day One, part of the Tools and Technology track, about RSS: The Publish/Subscribe Model. And he’ll also be giving the closing key note, Semantic Web – How Web 2.0 is changing the way we manage content on the web.
Salim says, “Web 2.0 technology is forming the basis of a nervous system on the Internet.” That’s how he sees the future of the internet. And at his key note presentation, he will be giving a technology framework for the Web 2.0 concept, which is changing the way the Internet works–from what we now know as “search,” to the complex organism it has become, one with technology that acts much the same way memory does. Sounds like the future is here, and you can catch a glimpse of it from Salim.
