Piping The Economist through Flickr
As a team with the task of coming up with something truly innovative on the web, we couldn’t help having a look at a new service provided by Yahoo called “Pipes”. After all, Tim O’Reilly of Web 2.0 fame has called it “a milestone in the history of the internet”.
Although Pipes is still showing its youth, we do agree. For the first time, a service lets even less-techy souls build their own “mashups” — combining several data feeds to create a new one.
In this simple example, I have taken articles from Economist.com’s news analysis section and pushed their headlines through the search function of , a community picture site.
The result is not very impressive: just some seemingly random pictures. But it could be improved by combining them with the articles (though I haven’t yet figured out whether this is possible).
So why are we interested? Because Pipes is likely to again demonstrate the one approach that really works on the internet: give people easy to use tools – and they will come up with great new things.
February 23rd, 2007 at 11:20 am
I am not sure I quite understand to what extent pipes can be used to do useful stuff (although I have only messed with it for about 10 minutes) - but you are absolutely right to say “the one approach that really works on the internet: give people easy to use tools – and they will come up with great new things.” - not sure (yet) whether pipes is a great tool.
March 6th, 2007 at 2:55 pm
I’d say that Pipes is a good tool but we will see another iteration (especially with the user interface) before it becomes more mainstream in the techie world. The functionality and step forward towards a truely semantic web are great - just a poor interface and too restrictive at present.
March 6th, 2007 at 5:17 pm
Pipes for me is a sub standard tool for techies. Most techies can simply go program stuff if they need. For me Pipes was trying to go out to non techies and they failed.