Yahoo! - Pipes

Yahoo! pipes is an interesting new offering from Yahoo! that allows users to aggregate inputs from various different sources. The Pipes intro page describes the service as:

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.

[update: More on this on this post]

You can read more about the initial reactions here, here and here. In fact the new service won such popularity that it went down in the first couple of hours.

I played around a little with Yahoo! Pipes and it looks like a potentially powerful tool. Unfortunately most users seem to be more keen on having their own application than on creating something of real value. I guess we will have to wait for the initial buzz to die down before we start seeing really useful applications.

Consider this - one of the first and most popular Pipes. According to the creator

This Pipe takes the New York Times homepage, passes it thru Content Analysis and uses the keywords to find Photos at Flickr.

If you actually run the Pipe the only thing that you notice is that it is possible to extract pictures of semi-naked woman from Flicker, no matter what the context. This again might be due to the lack of sufficient innovation on behalf of the creators.

The same thing goes for using other widgets - The problem that needs to be addressed is the fact that the shear volume of adult content on the web is likely to drown out any attempt to actually generate any meaningful content without a higher degree of control.

I have created a Yahoo account:

publicpipes@yahoo.com
password: teststuff


It should be fun to have readers create pipes together.

So go ahead, create your pipe, see what others are working on and lets hope a combined service comes out of this.