Feb 9

Pipes - first impressions   Posted by sharps, tagged with atom pipes rss yahoo

Yahoo Pipes' servers have recovered so I just had a quick play and created my first pipe. The feeling I came away with was that the whole environment is a bit constrained - I found myself constantly wanting to do things that the environment wouldn't allow - like creating a new element and populating it with data from an existing feed. I'd really like to see an XSLT operator that would allow you do muck about with the feed a bit more.

The editor is something else - I think Yahoo have really set the bar for browser based UIs - the whole concept of connecting sources and input fields to operators just seems natural though the iterators did seem a little odd at first glance.

I'm guessing that the current palette of operators is just a start and that new operators will be introduced allowing for some pretty interesting applications - for now I think what we'll see is a couple of hundred iterations on the same "get a feed and run it through Flickr" (ie. like mine). Of course - I'd be happy to see  human ingenuity prove me wrong.

 

Feb 8

Pipework for Web2   Posted by sharps, tagged with pipes rss web2 yahoo

I saw some rumours about Yahoo Pipes last week - it went live last night.

Though I haven't had time for more than a cursory look, I have a feeling that this could be pretty important. And I think it has relevance way beyond creating custom news feeds.

If you're familiar with Unix Pipes (eg. "who | sort") you'll grok Yahoo Pipes. Just replace processes with URLs, Feeds, Applications on the Web.

I did have a quick play with the browser-based tool (which is pretty sweet) but I didn't get very far - looks like Yahoo's servers are getting hit hard. They clearly need some of these

As an example (trivial) use-case, a while back - I wanted to create a unified feed of the build / news feeds from a bunch of java.net projects. Pipes would let you create this pipe in a couple of minutes. When Yahoo servers catch-up - I'll give it a try.

Read more about Pipes on Dave Johnson's blog, Tech Crunch and O'Reilly Radar.

Update - I just tried hitting the service again and get "Our Pipes are clogged! We've called the plumbers!" - too funny. Seriously guys - get some of these.