Pretty Empty Pipes
I played around with Pipes and aside from loosely matching iTunes songs with YouTube videos or loosely matching Flickr photos with NY Times articles, I’ve yet to ‘get it’.
The interface itself is pretty – and seemingly powerful and simple. Reminiscent of Microsoft’s Visual Basic or Apple’s Automator. But in the end, Pipes is chartjunk – or as Dave Winer said, “[a] visually appealing but information sparse IDE”.
If the goal of Pipes was to simplify the process of mashing up and filtering feeds – they left all the hard parts in; the geeky terms (”Base”, “Position”, “Query Parameters”, “Debug”, “Truncate”, “For Each”) and the URLs themselves.
Seems to me, the same functionality could be achieved with any number of the other feed aggregators out there (My.Yahoo.com comes to mind).
If you’ve been able to do something cool and useful with Pipes – let me know. I’d like to be proven wrong here (and move this post from ‘useless’ to ‘useful’).
ELSEWHERE:
Alex Iskold says Pipes has turned the web into a big database…I think we already had that with XML-RPC, RSS, SOAP, and REST.
4 Comments
Factoring in basic translation through babblefish is nice – we have product reviews we need to keep up on in asian language sets. Pipes makes that easier (but far from perfect.)
IMO, Pipes will be very valuable for wide audiences. But it will be behind the scenes. Many thousands of Yahoo users are exposed to feeds on a daily basis and don’t even know it. Pipes could factor in similarly.
I’m waiting for niche experts to get in it and mash relevant feeds on narrow topics – eg: eating healthy, going carbon neutral, etc. The creator / topic expert can update the url’s and operators, I can subscribe to the output. All is well.
I think the filtering capabilities could be powerful. For example, a local Star Tribune feed could be further filtered down to stories mentioning Longfellow.
If your goal is to search for or block against posts containing a keyword or phrase, feed rinse is a lot easier to grok. Pipes is more for complex mashery. It does a good job, but it’s geeky.
Nice idea, similar in concept to Apple Research Labs’ Fabrik. I believe Pipes is now suffering from scalability issues on the server side. Funny, for some reason, they never took this into account when they started to develop it.
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[...] In February there was a lot of buzz about Pipes, Yahoo’s construction kit for feeds created from other feeds. A few weeks later it seems a good idea to ask how’s it doing? [...]