Salim Ismail joins Yahoo!

I'm surprised that we were able to keep this under wraps for so long!

Mike Arrington's post at TechCrunch does a fine job of conveying why we think this is a big deal. There are a couple details that I can help clarify though:

"Tomorrow they’ll announce..."

Well, not really... I think that you just announced it Mike! Salim confirmed too! But hey, if you're looking for an official Yahoo! person with a working purple badge to actually confirm... I'll bite! We hired Salim!

He takes over from interim head...

That's not how I'd put it. Caterina's role in my group (and in Brickhouse in particular) is ongoing and formidable. She's not only been the driving force behind making this happen, but also will remain the "north star" that ensures the program rocks. As you point out, Brickhouse itself is "yet-to-be-launched" so we'll be saying a lot more about it and clarifying all this in the near future. But I couldn't be happier or prouder to have both Salim and Caterina involved. Lucky us!

In the really bad pun department... The only shame is that Salim isn't working on Y! Mail... after all, Salim Ismail... And my mentor Ramesh Jain... He's such an Artificial Intelligence pioneer they put AI smack-dab-in-the-middle of his name... Speaking of names, can you guess how many times Caterina has been spell-checked into "catering?" (Not to mention the problems she has with her last name...) Ok... I can hear you groaning. I'll stop now.

Welcome Salim!

We are hiring!

Piggybacking on Jeremy's post...

Yahoo's Advanced Development Division is hiring. This is the team that's brought you Pipes, Hack Day, Open Hack Day, TagMaps, ZoneTag, Checkmates... and as Daniel Raffel wrote "other projects too secret to mention."

We need insanely creative, passionate individuals who are highly motivated to change the internet (and the world) as we know it. We've put together a supergroup already. You'll be working with bona fide rockstars of the industry. It'll be fun, lots of fun.

If you think you're "our kinda people", please drop us a line...

Thanks!

Tough but productive week for MyBlogLog

Caterina has a great take that puts it all in perspective.

The team seems battle scarred and tired but exit the week wiser and with a better service. Nice going. May next week be just as productive... but less... um... exciting.

Pipes!

Tim said it better than I could ever hope to...

I'm really proud that our team has launched Pipes tonight. It's still raw with plenty of rough edges... and it'd surprise me if more than a few folks will be able to connect-the-dots and see where this leads (... though Tim's explaining will surely help!) Still, it was time and the concept is "ready enough" to unleash IMHO.

My parents just arrived in the Bay Area, and so tonight I'll focus on them. In the upcoming days, I hope I'll find time to share why I'm so excited about Pipes and proud of the team. In the meantime, go smoke a pipe!

(BTW, I recommend that you check out the "Apartments near Something" pipe for an example of a smokin' pipe.)

The team themselves are the best resources for more info:
- Pasha, who deserves all the credit for both the idea and leading the team,
- Edward, whose passion is matched only by his technical skill,
- Jonathan, the man behind what may be the slickest AJAX application on the web,
- Kevin, who joined recently but completely took the design to a new level in a matter of weeks
- and Daniel, without whom this would be just another great idea that never would have seen the light of day.

And the endeavor was a Caterina Fake production, as all the above are members of her TechDev team.

There were many other supporters and contributors, but I'll avoid the slippery slope of invoking them because I'm mostly clueless.

Jeremy explains it too....

---