djjose

Nearly 20 years later, it's fascinating to see Yahoo! Pipes for AI Agents.

Let me just tell you and anyone that worked on the team, thanks so much for it. You saved me hours of work and let me do it really damn well. This is a sad, sad day. I used Pipes extensively and ironically enough at Yahoo for some features/prototypes on News and Search. It was such an elegant and powerful app, I really wish Yahoo had given it more love.

Been using it for years with no intention of stopping. Me and my friends use it as a way to track all the places we've been to and places we like. So when I'm back in a city I've been to I can look at my history and recall a place I liked and go to it again. Or if someone is going to a place I've traveled to, I create a list of the places I liked and share it with them. I wish it was easier to do these use cases in the app. Mining my own history and surfacing that content would be very interesting and useful to me, especially if I can share it and have others shared with me. The tips are also far more helpful to me than the foodie-wannabe Yelp reviews for the same venues.

I'm curious about this POV from folks of getting mobile web apps to look and feel like mobile native apps being a prerequisite for success. I just don't think this is true. After all, desktop web apps look and feel nothing like desktop native apps.

I too believe that mobile web will one day overtake mobile native apps for most peoples' daily usage. I just don't think it'll look or act anything like what we're currently doing. Luke Wroblewski gives a great talk about the early days of a new medium being an awkward state where we try to shoehorn what worked in the last medium into it. At some point we'll figure out a design and usage patten for the mobile web that'll make a world of sense in hindsight. We're just not there yet IMO and of course I have no idea what this looks like.

The crux of their troubles comes from this paragraph in the Warning Letter: "However, even after these many interactions with 23andMe, we still do not have any assurance that the firm has analytically or clinically validated the PGS for its intended uses, which have expanded from the uses that the firm identified in its submissions. In your letter dated January 9, 2013, you stated that the firm is “completing the additional analytical and clinical validations for the tests that have been submitted” and is “planning extensive labeling studies that will take several months to complete.” Thus, months after you submitted your 510(k)s and more than 5 years after you began marketing, you still had not completed some of the studies and had not even started other studies necessary to support a marketing submission for the PGS. It is now eleven months later, and you have yet to provide FDA with any new information about these tests."

The FDA, while being a pain in the rear at times, will actually work with you to meet compliance. But you have to show work and be continually in touch with them and show progress (and document everything according to your own procedures, complying to regulations of course). You can't just say you're working on compliance and then not follow through and show evidence. The issue for 23andMe is the on-label use of the product "in the diagnosis of disease or other conditions or in the cure, mitigation, treatment, or prevention of disease, or is intended to affect the structure or function of the body." They market the product this way. If you want to market your product as such, you have to show proof to the FDA and receive approval to label the medical product in this manner. It looks like 23andMe is either not working towards compliance (and is misleading the FDA) or is doing a terrible job documenting their work towards compliance and keeping the FDA abreast (my guess is this is what's happening). That in itself will get you in trouble, but then expanding your marketing for even more on-label use of the product - which hasn't been submitted to the FDA apparently - while at the same time not having FDA approval for the original use is just plain stupid.

Honestly, even for someone that started his career making table HTML layouts with inline styling it's a major PITA to code up emails that look respectable on all clients. I can't wait to try this out.