Who’s using Pipes?
So, back when I had more time (some days ago) I spent a reasonable amount of it playing around with Yahoo Pipes. Recently, I’ve been seeing some concerns that the audience for Pipes is developers who were already doing the things Pipes facilitates in the language of their choice. The concerns are valid, but I don’t think are entirely fair or accurate.
It is definitely true that Pipes is a technical beast, my Dad is in no way going to sit down and make his RSS mashup using it. It requires a certain mode of thinking and a reasonable understanding of the nature of the feeds it is working with. It also requires a certain mode of thinking, at this point, to come up with something you’d even want to do, much less do it. I would say, if you can grasp some of the finer points of html and css you are more than equipped to work with the Pipes interface - if it isn’t immediately intuitive to you, looking at a couple examples and playing around with creating your own will pretty quickly get you up to speed.
I mean this stuff is inherently at least mildly complex. The interface does a bang up job of simplifying your interaction with the data and I believe it significantly lowers the barrier to try and start working with it. It is much easier to understand dragging a line from a user input module to a fetch modules url box than it is to learn about how your language of choice gets user input and then how it gets data and then how to easily process that data. So the audience for this isn’t quite anybody, but it’s definitely and clearly more than developers.
And anecdotally I think the yahoo forums support that. I’ve seen questions and pipes from people who I definitely don’t believe are developers. This is, hopefully, just the beginning for Pipes and it’s audience is naturally going to be those who are a little on the geekier side as the first adopters. Hopefully as this matures and more modules are available more people will start to have an itch that they’ll be able to scratch themselves with a little help from Y!.
I hope to update a couple files that help with the integration of Pipes with websites using AJAX, Web2.0 style - right now those are pretty basic and fixated on my technorati link (which is what generates my “Who else is writing about this?” links underneath each post), but I have plans to make it more generic so they’ll be able to work with any Pipe. When I get some more time, that is.
