A few years ago, following the explosion of custom web APIs from various services around the world, Yahoo! launched the YQL service, which allows to query data from a variety of different providers with a unified Yahoo Query Language.

Having worked with the APIs of Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Google Maps, YouTube and more, I very much enjoy the idea. However, I do not see it mentioned often, and of course this is one of those efforts that makes sense when enough people follow it and expose their API through this layer.

Are there some statitics of usage? Or some declarations from Yahoo about the destiny of YQL?

I would also be interested in hearing your experience if you have tried it directly.