Interesting: Yahoo! Pipes

February 8th, 2007

Yahoo! Pipes.

So I wanted to actually mess around with Yahoo! Pipes, which was down most of today, before commenting on it. I finally got in, and it’s pretty slick. It didn’t take much time to figure out how to use it, and make a simple pipe: one that pulls feeds from Megite, Techmeme, and Tailrank, and searches for Apple related news. Here’s the pipe.

I found using the pipe editor pretty easy, and I’m only scratching the surface. Basically there are modules that take data in while others perform operations. You link them together by clicking and dragging from outlets to inlets. Finally, the data is output in RSS format to do with as you will. Here’s a more complex pipe explanation at O’Reilly Radar. I also noticed that the Apple News pipe I created, became an object I could use in a new pipe.

The closest analogy I’m familiar with is a really cool music program called Max/MSP that started out as a way to manipulate MIDI data in real time, but eventually got into signal processing. It uses a graphical, module environment connected by “wires.” The stuff you can do with it is mind-boggling. The “patches” can also be saved as stand-alone audio processing programs.

But back to Pipes. It’s important to note that in the future, this won’t be just limited to RSS feeds. First, technology enabled average folks to record their own music and videos on home computers. Web 2.0 has allowed people to distribute this media over the internet. Much has been made of this user-created content spreading all over the place. So what’s the next conceivable step? Certainly, average people create their own dynamic web sites. It’s not so far fetched when you think about how today, FrontPage and iWeb allow folks to make pretty nice looking static HTML pages.

So I’m already thinking about how I might try to create my own newspaper with Yahoo! Pipes, that spits out one feed that I can subscribe to in my feed reader. I’m hoping in the future, I could output data into a web page I’ve designed myself, essentially creating my own portal.

On another note, I’m really impressed this is coming from Yahoo!. I read at Business 2.0 beta that the person spearheading this is flickr’s Caterina Fake. This might be a way of brainstorming a cool integration of all of Yahoo!’s Web 2.0 acquisitions: let users mess with the data served up by these sites and see what emerges. Why leave only the content to the users? How about just let them design the sites, too?

Instead of coming up with more “me too” Web 2.0 stuff, Yahoo! has just jumped ahead to Web 3.0. I’m totally serious!

Note: Check out this BusinessWeek article talking about “Brickhouse”: a new division within Yahoo! that helped develop this idea internally. It also touches on MyBlogLog, a service that I use regularly and Yahoo! acquired recently. This is the kind of thinking that gets peanut butter out of your mouth, IMHO.

Additional Reading: Ars Technica, Mathew Ingram, Wired, O’Reilly Radar

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