Every so often, I check my site statistics to see who comes to Occam’s RazR. Primarily, it’s to answer the question “Why on Earth would they care?”

Last Friday, after publishing the piece about important news happening slow, I caught the following hit from Mountain View, California:

Pipes

I do have the occasional human hit from Google. (I even know a guy working there. Yeah Crutcher. I’m talking about you.) What caught my eye was the referral link — from Yahoo Pipes. Pipes is a wonderful tool for taking big chunks of RSS data, and pushing it through a series of operations. Slice, dice, chop, pop, concatenate, delineate, sort, de-dupe, and throw for a loop. You can do a lot of things with Pipes. (I use pipes myself, to track Red Cross-related stories in a dozen states. Primarily, I use the tool to strip out the duplicate stories that run on different websites.)

So — someone at Google is using Yahoo Pipes, in this case to track any mentions of Google’s bid in the federal spectrum auction I referenced last week. And who can blame them? It’s a wonderful tool. I’m sure many on the Google campus also use del.icio.us and Flickr too (now owned by Yahoo.)

A New Culture

Those who grew up ahead of me did so at a time when this would have been unthinkable. An unpardonable sin, being caught using the competition’s product. Times have changed. The generation coming in behind me wouldn’t give this a second thought. It’s about getting the job done, and the appearances be damned.

If you’re coding at Google, you might spend some time trying to develop a new way of accomplishing the same thing, but what would be the point? The race is to get out in front with the new Killer Application, the service that no one could imagine today and couldn’t imagine being without tomorrow. It’s a race to the top, where everyone is standing on each others’ shoulders, whether they are giants or not. Why re-create the wheel, when the point is to build things for the cars that use them?

True, the landscape of web technology and coding is very different. We’re talking about technologies that use RSS — a standard based on the idea that information should be free of proprietary shackles, and ought to be as nimble as possible to be as useful as can be. But as you think about how to apply this notion, you’ve got to consider the arena. Are we talking about an end-product with a fixed value? Are we talking about a culture of competition or collaboration? Are we dealing with a generation that will look down on you for borrowing? Or one who will pass you by for not using the tools that maximize your time?

Those who fail to re-examine the rules of the game get beaten before they know it. Don’t re-create the wheel, when what you should re-create is your perspective.

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