I’ve been itching to put together a bunch of mashups, but there’s only so many lazyweb requests you’re allowed to make if you can’t grok AJAX. Yahoo’s just-launched Pipes promises to blur the lines between nerds and geeks — offering the powers of developer nerds to content geeks, and vice versa. Tim O’Reilly is nearly verklempt, and even after my friend Kevin Cheng hinted at how the transcendently awesome the project he was working on might turn out, I’m still surprised. It’s like a visual Ruby on Rails. (UPDATE: The Pipes site is not online as of Thursday morning. We’ll check with Yahoo to see what’s up.)
That said, I could be caught up in my own imagination, and nobody’s had much time to play with what Yahoo is calling “an interactive feed aggregator and manipulator.” But tools you can play with are always my favorite tools.
Full-size screenshots below the jump.
Pipes appears to be down.
looks like them yahoo pipes got clogged .
now How will I get my damn RSS feeds
Looks like I’ll have to try those Tubes
My attempt at a grok: Pipes is Excel for Internet Data Feeds.
Honestly, my first reaction was that it looks a lot like Max/MSP, a really cool ‘visual programming’ tool for audio and video. From a development perspective, it also reminded me of something like Ning.
grok: visualizes the outcomes of data mash-ups for anyone with an good idea and no software engineer?
Tinker toys for net plumbers and content collectors?
Yahoo Pipes make creation of trivial RSS processors trivial but that’s it, not much to be excited IMO.