Some more thoughts on Yahoo Pipes

I’ve spent a fairly reasonable amount of time messing around with pipes and have a few broad thoughts. I think it’s an impressive technology for sure and it really lowers the barrier to entry for people to start messing around with RSS feeds. You still need to be savvy, but if you can put together a page of html, you can get things done in Pipes for sure.

What I think it needs a lot more of is modules. Right now, there’s only so much you can do - a lot of the modules I see basically just bring together a bunch of different feeds, which is great but I think the potential is there for much more. With more programatic modules, like branching and more robust use of strings, I suspect a lot more windows would open. “But, Felix,” I know you’re thinking, “all those modules will be too complex for a non-programmer to handle.” That may or may not be true, but here’s the catch, they can add a source module that takes the output of a Pipe. With that it will be easy to create drop in modules that fit right into the flow of a pipe. For example, I could create a pipe that takes a pipe as input and adds the domain to the title of every element. In my pipe, I - as an incredibly talented developer - can use my mad Pipes skillz to do all sorts of trickery to get this to work. But the pipe using mine simply needs to know that it adds the title - it’s as simple to use as a filter module. Effectively this allows users to create new modules - all someone else would need to do was find my module, clone it and then it would be available in his library for use.

So, by adding in a lot more programmatic modules and also allowing pipes to pass data to each other, I think a world of opportunity can open for Pipes users of all skill levels. The amount of interesting possibilites would grow exponentially when compared to the number of modules as each module will be usable in cool and unexpected ways. Looking at the Regex module as an example, already, there’s just so much that you can do. I am sure this is what’s coming down the pipes.

Mar 12th, 2007 · Comments RSS · · · · · Tags: pipes