Piping hot mash
There’s a buzz in the web developer community over the new Yahoo! Pipes service - it’s been flagged up on O’Reilly Radar and Read/Write Web. It’s not as pretty as GoogleMaps but more significant in what it can allow you to do.
As the name suggests it is more to do with the plumbing behind the scenes than enhancing the user experience. However there are many exciting possibilities that it opens up - bringing content together from disparate websites and then combining them until you have something that could be feed into your own site.
The idea is borrowed from the pipes and filters functionality offered in Unix - take the information coming out of one process and feed it into another. Yahoo! Pipes applies that paradigm to the Internet. You start off with an information source (or a range of them), chain together a number of processes (combining, filtering, sorting, etc.) and then pump out an RSS feed at the other end. (There are options for entering data through the Yahoo! Pipes website & also viewing the results there, but at the moment I’m just concentrating on providing content to your website.)
An example Pipe that they provide is the Aggregated News Alerts. This allows you to search for information from a range of sources (Bloglines, Google Blog Search, Technorati, etc.). The results are combined, sorted in date order & de-duplicated. It would be very easy to duplicate this Pipe, amend it so that the search term was already entered and therefore require no user interaction. If I wanted to include the results of that Pipe in this blog then I could use a WordPress plugin such as FeedWordPress or inlineRSS.
Now none of that is rocket science, it’s all something that a web developer could provide for you. However they’re not going to be able to do it with so little effort, adjust it so quickly to your changing requirements, nor offer an interface that’s so easy to use. Aggregating content has just become a commodity.
There are a few downsides to it all. The most notable at the moment is that it’s still in beta - and this is a real beta phase as I’ve had a few errors as I’ve been experimenting with creating new Pipes. In the longer term it could be the hardware and network resources made available to the service that could cause problems - the more successful it is the more data it needs to bring in, process & send out.
I’m not entirely clear where it fits into the business plan for Yahoo!, but I’m quite content to operate in ignorance on this one. Maybe it will end up mirroring Flickr with free and subscription accounts.
I would suspect that if it proves to be unsustainable then the code could easily be made available as open-source - a route that other corporates such as IBM have taken in the past. There doesn’t seem to be much that would be commercially sensitive, for example at the moment I would think there’s only the content analysis and location extraction that would use some of their core search technology.
The skills involved reduce the number of people who are likely to create their own Pipe, but it wouldn’t take a lot of effort to show someone with normal IT skills around an existing one in the visual editor so that they could make amendments on their own (e.g. adding another RSS feed, changing the number of items to include, the order they are sorted in, etc.).
I’m off to explore more …
