Have you heard about this one? I was aked by a friend to have a look at this new concept. Initially I could not understand, I couldn’t figure out how to make it work, what to implement, what it achieved. So as usual, I let it slip out of my mind and more simpler things kept my grey matter active… like watching tennis, cricket, and when I wanted to give the grey cells a little bit of breather I watched bollywood movies. This continued till yesterday, when suddenly some anomaly in the universe popped the Yahoo! pipes back into my mind. Since the work schedule was bit relaxed, I decided to unearth the mystery of these weird pipes. After all what followed through these pipes, certainly not crude oil or did it???

Well after some initial read up, it was safe to conclude that Yahoo! still did not have any say in OPEC. And then as I delved more into these pipes, I realized that this was a ingenious concept that I think has the potential to change, hmm well, create a new way of serving information to the user from data scattered all over the web. Normally as it stands today, a user can request information from a single website. He can set filters and narrow the scope of the data that he thinks contains the information he requires.

But here is what Yahoo! pipe promises. You can feed this application data from multiple sources dynamically from the web and channel this information through various pipes applying your custom rules and transform this information so that it maps with any entity and voila! You have something which I am sure has no business sense now, but in time will spark an idea which in a few years will be sold for an insanely huge amount.

Currently creating a pipe is kinda complex, as it uses meta-language and programming constructs that a layman may find hard to grasp. But with time I am sure this will get simpler. And it is from here on that I expect this framework to deliver.

There already is a pipe that takes the top songs list from iTunes and then gives the user links to the videos for these songs. You can check it out here. And this is a fairly simple pipe to implement and actually sounds like something that one may find useful, right??? So Yahoo! pipes has the capability to deliver, but it requires the ingenuity of the human grey matter to realize its full potential…

Looks like Web 2.0 is finally beginning to deliver. Also I must give it up for the guys at Yahoo! to actually come up with this cool technology. Microsoft too, not so long ago, announced what I think is the most exciting technology since Windows, MS Surface. It’s time for guys at Google to pull up their socks… looks like they are falling behind.

For more information

http://www.dashes.com/anil/2007/02/yahoo-pipes.html

http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2007/02/pipes_and_filte.html/

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