Yahoo rolled out “Pipes.” The is some buzz here, and for good reason. For a geek, especially an older one, one of the most elegant (easy with power) solutions for assembly of components is the Unix pipe concept. If you know a few basic tools that know how to manipulate streams of data, you can move mountains with relative ease. And making a special purpose tool to play in this world is trivial.
Jeremy Zawodny chimes in (including many links to examples and other posts. Brady Forrest over at O’Reilly also has a nice overview. Of course, Tim O’Reilly himself has something to say.
So Yahoo did a few great things with this idea. First, it is using RSS. This is powerful in how well understood and ubiquitous RSS is. Second, and most importantly, they are calling it “Pipes.” It conveys the concept to a legion of people who already understand the concept.
I haven’t used it yet, but at the 50,000 ft level, this looks very good, and from one of the big boys. It will be interesting to see how Microsoft responds with their Live Bookmark functionality the were demoing and talking about last year.
I’ll also be interested to see how this comes to the enterprise. With the growing number of “outside the firewall” places people are starting to put data, security and trust are going to be key. Today almost all “private” RSS feeds assume security through obscurity (some large unique part of a URL). That won’t last long. Identity is key, as is trust. But they have to be simple enough to roll into the likes of Yahoo Pipes.
[tags]yahoo, pipe, rss, development[/tags]
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