Yahoo! Builds A Brickhouse

We reported previously on Yahoo! Pipes, a new product released by the Internet giant last week. It received so much attention in its first few hours of release that it cowed under from the weight of millions of queries made from around the globe. It’s a good sign – at least for Yahoo! – to be in the thick of tech news again. But it’s not good news for its industrial strength to remain in question. Nonetheless, today we take a step back and give a glimpse of the new division at Yahoo! from which Pipes emerged: Brickhouse.

Scheduled for an official launch in March, Brickhouse is Yahoo’s in-house think tank, where it plans to develop cutting edge applications and solutions to contend with the growing list of small-house operations, which have been fuelling the Web 2.0 boom. The creators of Brickhouse have decided to make a go at developing sites and special services, with an attempt to prevent the next MySpace from being an outside star.

Yahoo! has spent millions upon millions to acquire sites that it was unable to surpass with its own generic and bland deliveries over the past several years. With Brickhouse they hope to change that trend. Hope is the key word.

Yahoo! Pipes, the first public release out of the minds that comprise Brickhouse, is definitely a healthy start in a new direction. People now want more power on the client side to mold products and services to best fit their workflow, their methodology, their lives. Yahoo! has understood this shift to greater adaptability, particularly when it comes to web apps, but for the most part, such understanding has really only been an aside to the company’s growth plan.

Yahoo! purchased Flickr first and foremost because of its popularity, but it was what the end user favored that guaranteed the service’s long-term prospects. It’s still around, and remains one of the most popular items in the photo-sharing genre. Del.icio.us is another good acquisition, but, nevertheless, an acquisition.

Yahoo! wants to stop releasing many millions per year out of its war chest to remain a strong adversary to Google and Microsoft. It wishes to focus on achievement made within its walls. With an internal force dedicated to finding and developing solutions, Yahoo! likely wishes to integrate today’s offerings with those brought to fruition by the team at Brickhouse, tightly.

Currently, many of its purchases are still solitary entities. While some enjoy the lack of the Yahoo! taint that they feel has often signaled the downfall of many great ideas, closer integration is key to making Web 2.0 apps more powerful, more useful, and at the end of the day, more essential.

Just look at Google’s applications to understand this progression. As much as we enjoy new and exciting products, inventions, and innovations, we’d like even more to see things working together, across the line. As our digital lives move from local to remote storage, we’ll definitely need to see more cooperation between our applications of choice. Of course, you can only go so far before competing forces think so much of complete unity, regardless of borders. But at least when inside the empires of Redmond, Sunnyvale, and Mountain View, one should be able to delve into all that a company has to offer without having to jump through successive hoops to achieve account-wide synchronicity.

Things have begun to move in closer to one another, absolutely. But there’s much more still to do, and if history tells us anything at all, it’s that there’s never best, only better.