Pipes!
Now all of the interwebs is talking about Yahoo Pipes, I initially thought it was the sort of thing that OO programming was promising - how from then on programming would be done in a visual IDE by connecting these boxes together with lines. That worked out really well, but Pipes turns out to be a similar idea but much scaled down in scope. Working with various feed formats it takes a unixy filter approach where you connect these boxes that represent some sort of filter and put out some output. It really seems quite interesting, what with it’s output formats in RSS, RDF, Atom and very interestingly in JSON.
The service is pretty slow right now, so there’s not much playing around to do with it, but I think with it’s stated scope Pipes could be really great. I’ve read some reviews around that take issue with the fact that it’s still midly complex to do interesting things. Ultimately, processing xml and using filters is a complex process - what pipes does is drastically lowers the barrier to entry it doesn’t eliminate it. Complaining about it’s continued mild complexity would be like complaining that airlines are good and all, but not everyone can afford to fly to China. Sure my dad isn’t going to be making any pipes soon, but a whole lot more people in the world will now be able to do things they never could before.
Yahoo, despite all the craziness that’s going on with it’s ad serving platform (another discussion) and inability to execute on anything, is doing really interesting things like Pipes and it’s Yahoo UI project.
