Thursday, May 10, 2007

[Misc] Web 2.5 ;-) Pipes

Ok, I confess, this is probably not a "core" SE topic, however, I was stumbling over Yahoo Pipes today, and I was fascinated. Until now I am not really sure, what I could use this service for and if at all, but yet it looks great.

I like it because the idea is fascinating: you can "program" graphically specific data-workflows: Define some input stream (RSS, XML), some preparation, filtering, ... steps and eventually generate some (RSS) output. So it is a kind of "RSS construction" kit. It is, however a very nice application, apparently mostly Javascript, fast, easy to use.

I wrote Web 2.5, because it might be the next trend to give the "end-user" more web-development skills at hand to create own small services.

Ideas anyone?

3 comments:

Unknown said...

Pipes is indeed cool, especially because it showcases some of HTML5s canvas (http://labs.mininova.org/canvas/).

For the end user, Pipes is still much too complex, but I could imagine that this sort of "simple data-aggregation" would be perfect for Business Intelligence Applications - different data sources from inside and outside the company could be combined via a simple user interface to produce more meaningful results. (E.g. combine the internal sales data with geographic information about the customers, their distance to outlets, etc.).

Alexander Schatten said...

Indeed, that is also my impression.

For me (as I tried to express in the BLOG); not "Pipes as is" is interesting, but the fact, that "user made logic via Webapplication" ist starting to get a moment.

this is why I made the Web 2.5 joke...

I also believe, that pipes is too complex for most end-users, plus there is not much need for it (particularly for end-users) but the first step is done.

Unknown said...

Talking about letting users create more useful content by mashing multiple data sources - Googles Mashup Editor is also an interesting start into that area.

It allows you to "mash" different elements and data sources rather easily, but it also allows you to tap the JavaScript API.

Website:
http://www.googlemashups.com/

Take the tour:
http://code.google.com/gme/tour/tour1.html

And the blog with news and examples can be found at:
http://googlemashupeditor.blogspot.com/