Yahoo! launched pipes yesterday and the product looks impressive. It has recieved a very good response from tech bloggers all around, but the greatest praise it has received is from Tom O’reilly who calls it as a milestone in the history of Internet. Yahoo! employee Kevin Cheng, who is one of the developers of pipes, says there are countless ideas to be implemented and they are working on some awesome features. Indeed a great product from Yahoo!.
From what I have understood about the product, it allows users to mix, match and filter data sources into RSS feeds. Brady Forrest talks about how to build pipes in a great detail. The name pipes come from Unix world, where we use pipes to pass filtered output of one command to other. From the website:
Pipes is a hosted service that lets you remix feeds and create new data mashups in a visual programming environment. The name of the service pays tribute to Unix pipes, which let programmers do astonishingly clever things by making it easy to chain simple utilities together on the command line.
Philosophy Behind the Project
There is a rapidly-growing body of well-structured data available online in the form of XML feeds. These feeds range from simple lists of blog entries and news stories to more structured, machine-generated data sources like the Yahoo! Maps Traffic RSS feed. Because of the dearth of tools for manipulating these data sources in meaningful ways, their use has so far largely been limited to feed readers.
Good work Yahoo!.
