Yahoo Pipes

ahab_2001 writes "Yahoo has introduced a new product called Pipes. It seems to be a GUI-based interface for building applications that aggregate RSS feeds and other services, creating Web-based apps from various sources, and publishing those apps. Sounds very cool. TechCrunch has a decent write-up, and Tim O'Reilly is all over it. The site was down for a few hours and is just back up. Has anybody tried this?" From the TechCrunch article: "Pipes is... akin to a shell scripting environment for the web rather than just a simple conduit between applications."

Priceless...

"Our Pipes are clogged! We've called the plumbers!"

Though I thought we all knew that the Internet was a series of tubes...

damn right.

Though I thought we all knew that the Internet was a series of tubes...

Well, it's certainly not a big truck, that you can just dump something on.

Would've been more hilarious...

If the service were called "tubes"

Tubes?

Is this anything like Tubes [adessonow.com]?

What's googles version going to be called??

BONG. Bigger than a pipe. And it holds more too. Just don't drink the water.

Looks like yahoo

Needs a to run a lottery, so some lottery balls can clean out those stacked poker chips clogging the pipes.

Broken Pipe

Cannot write to STDOUT. Errno = 32: Broken pipe

YubNub?

I spent some time looking at it, but I couldn't figure what the advantage was over Yubnub ? ( except maybe the GUI+ the name brand/network effects )

Re:YubNub?

It doesn't really even resemble yubnub. The point of pipes is that you can pull in say 10 different rss feeds and push out a new feed containing the entries from those feeds that match a search or whatever. It isn't really anything that couldn't be done already, but it does(theoretically at this point...) offer an easy to use web based interface for putting it together, so it significantly lowers the bar.

Finally

Finally, an internet service even a member of Congress can understand.

The site was Dugg last night

How does something make it to the front of Slashdot when it the server was down *before* the story was posted here. The site went down after it was posted to Digg "upcoming" last night.

Apparently /. editors never clicked the link to see if it actually worked.

Editors? Editors? A Perl script could do your job better,

Re:The site was Dugg last night

Editors? Editors? I didn't know /. had editors, I thought it WAS a Perl script doing the job!

I'm working on a similar service

Except mine is called "A big truck you can just dump stuff on"

Pies, no problem

I will just call Super Mario Bros.

Well, I guess that proved ME wrong...

... about a week ago, one of my friends called me, and said "I have a tech question for you. What are pipes?"

I sat there for a few seconds, trying to figure out what in the world they were talking about, and finally answered "Round hollow things, like tubes."

Similar to QEDWiki

The concept sounds very similar to QEDWiki demo video [zend.com] (demo video requires Flash).
QEDWiki [ibm.com] is an IBM product based on the Zend Framework. You can create mash-ups and other things much like by drag and drop of components, all in your browser.

Slashdotted!

When I went to http://pipes.yahoo.com/ [yahoo.com], I saw this message:

Our Pipes are clogged! We've called the plumbers!

Well, at least the folks at Yahoo have a sense of humor. :-)

JDA (Javascript Device Architecture)

I haven't been able to try pipes yet, because the site is down. But I have a colleague who built something that sounds quite similar. It's called the Javascript Device Architecture [maya.com]. At the link, you can find demos and downloadable code. So, if you can't get to pipes, you could always try JDA out ;-)

slashdotted?

Site is showing: Our Pipes are clogged! We've called the plumbers!
One would assume that atleast Yahoo won't get Slashdotted...

Who's more foolish...

... the blog or the service that aggregates it?

Tinfoil hat ON!

So Yahoo has this great new service and has talked O'Reilly into covering it. Unfortunately, the Yahoo site promoting that technology was down before Slashdotters even got a chance to check it out. Supposedly, this is because the site was already Dug, but you and I know that Digg is really a front for the Federal government to collect all the weirdos in one online community. I think Yahoo doesn't really have a pipe system is place at all and they're just trying to build hype about it by paying off O'Reilly to write a favorable but not over-the-top review of the non-existant program. I think Pipes only exists as a screenshot right now. It's probably just another attempt to get Google to spend money on a project Yahoo has no real interest in. That way Google will never notice President Bush wiretapping Google monitoring China.

Fix Yahoo TV

Maybe someone can use this new technology to fix Yahoo TV [yahoo.com] so that it can be useful once again.

MOAR pipes

I hope yahoo's Pipes are a bit better than Portland's [nytimes.com]

Tell Me.....

So when does the evil Bowser and the Koopa Troopers start regulating the wole thing?

I'm assuming the whole project was written by two little Italian plumber brothers, and tha they forsaw the threats posed by Bowser.

still down

This thing has been on and off for me all day. If Google launched a product of this magnitude only to experience this type of outage on the first day everyone would be chiding them up and down. I demand reprimand!

netvibes anyone

Doesn't anyone else think this is way similar to netvibes [netvibes.com]

AWESOME

This was soo cool when I was writing 3d screen savers with it last year. Way to go Apple!! I love Quartz Composer.

Oh wait, Nevermind.

http://developer.apple.com/graphicsimaging/quartz/ quartzcomposer.html [apple.com]

Great

Great. Just what we need--yet another way to shuffle content around.

Am I the only one that things the real bottle neck is finding the time to read and think about all this information--and that yet another layer of goo, no matter how scriptastic, isn't really going to address the fundamental problem of information overload?

--MarkusQ

Infinite loops

I can pipe it further, as an RSS feed in its own right

You have be careful whenever your output can be used as another's input, that you don't wind up with an infinite loop.
That would explain why yahoo's pipes are clogged.

while they're clogged...

here's another one to try: kitchi [kitchi-rss.com] -- it's mostly build to drive some LED signs but web objects are being added as time allows

New pipe: slashdot run through flickr

I created this simple pipe in just a couple minutes, now that the site is up again.
Check out

http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/LM5nwfu32xGj_1LrZoQMO Q/ [yahoo.com] ... it's not as powerful as rssbus but w/ the friendly(/ier) GUI and visibility from yahoo, this really is pretty cool.

If it's anything like YUI

If this is anything like the phenomenal YUI javascript library [yahoo.com], then I would be very confident in its usefulness. The documentation for the YUI is just so unbelievably easy to use, it makes developing using those tools very pleasant. I would imagine the experience with Pipes would be the same.

Good Name For Script Correction.....

They should come out with an add-on program that corrects errors called Yahoo! Pipe-Cleaners.

Re:How do they do the connector graphics?

Probably using the Canvas tag - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canvas_(HTML_element) [wikipedia.org]