Friday, February 9th, 2007
OMG Pipes!
by Warren
Yahoo introduced (and were promptly swamped into dysfunction by) their new “Pipes” service yesterday. Near as I can tell, the idea behind Pipes is to take RSS feeds, tags and the like and mash them together in new and interesting ways. The most popular one so far is a pipe that takes keywords from the New York Times and matches them with Flickr, giving you a sorta-kinda real time picture gallery of whatever is making headlines.
Projects like this have been attempted before, such as mashing together Google Maps and Craigslist into the ultimate apartment finder. But what Pipes promises is the ability to create these mashups without having to muck around vith various APIs and other such voodoo. Tim O’Reilly, something of a seer on these matters, explains the significance of Yahoo Pipes on his blog.