Yahoo Pipes

I've never heard of Yahoo Pipes until I heard the TWIT podcast (if you don't know TWIT, it stands for This Week in Tech hosted by Leo Laporte). I love this podcast, they have a panel of people to talk about what has happened in the tech world for the past week, and just start ranting and having discussion. I was listening to this podcast while going to the gym, when I heard about this new thing called Yahoo Pipes. Apparently, John C. Dvorak, who is known at PC Magazine never really heard about this. Yahoo Pipes is basically making a mashup of various feeds put together where the output of one feed becomes the input of another feed. The basic idea is to customize the feeds of what you want to see, the user is in control. The term for Yahoo Pipes comes from the Unix pipe where you can make ad-hoc queries by taking output of one command to be the input into another.

Anil Dash has a great article on Yahoo Pipes which will do a much better of explaining than I can. Apparently, many people are saying Yahoo Pipes is really innovative and new, something that Yahoo hasn't really done, since all their other products are based on Google or are based on the companies that they have bought (namely Flickr, Upcoming.org, delicious). At first glance, I was like what's so new about Pipes? But then looking at the user interface and how you can edit certain pipes and create the workflow of what you want, and it has a GUI on the web site to handle that, I think it is the workflow that is the contribution that Yahoo is making to the Web 2.0 arena.

This composition of feeds to form pipes reminds me web services, where you have composition of existing services to create newer web services, and you have web services orchestration creating a workflow like WSFL and BPEL4WS.
I think this looks interesting, as this will encourage users to create their own mashups without having to write a single line of code.

On Technorati: Yahoo Pipes