Yahoo Pipes, a very neat app!
08 Feb 2007Well, web 2.0, for me has a lot to do with making data available in an agnostic manner, wether that be via RSS or via a web services API. Data tied to a presentation layer, such as a traditional website, is data that has no future outside that website. The rise of mash-ups is enabled by data being decoupled from it’s presentation. Being combined with other data makes that data more valuable.
Until now you’ve needed to be a reasonably adept programmer to put together different data sources to create mash-ups. But not now. Yahoo has just launched an application that allows anyone with the most rudementary conceptual knowledge of programming to create new mashups.
Yahoo Pipes is the new application, and it allows anyone to easily string together web data sources and funnel them through some rudimentary filters to create new mash-ups. Yahoo has been a bit absent with the whole innovation thing since Google became the industries’ darling but I think this marks their comeback in a big way.
There are a good series of articles on the O’Reilly Radar about why it’s important and how it works. Tech crunch has a good mention about Yahoo! Launching Pipes and There’s a nice bit about it from Yahoo MySQL guru Jeremy Zawodny.
The excitement about this product is very high in the tech community,
resulting in someone as big as yahoo having their new service overwhelmed. So
be patient when trying it out until they’ve got some new servers spun up!