Pipes: Rewire the web
February 7, 2007 11:30 PM   Subscribe

The internet is a series of Pipes. Create your own feed mashups with a visual programming environment.
posted by 2sheets (29 comments total) 2 users marked this as a favorite
 
At the moment it seems that everyone is tripping over their dicks to say how awesome this is. I'm not so sure, but it is a neat idea.

What actually bugs me the most about this story is that everyone that sees it always says "pipes are one of the greatest things about unix/linux!" as if you couldn't do the exact same thing on Windows too. All those great tools that you love to use on linux work just fine under Cygwin too.
posted by Rhomboid at 11:44 PM on February 7, 2007


and powershell is actually better anyway
posted by flaterik at 11:54 PM on February 7, 2007


Way cool. I saw this on Ajaxian and though,"Meh, I'll check it out in the morning," but curiosity won out and I've been tinkering all night.
posted by Loser at 12:00 AM on February 8, 2007


Um. Potentially interesting, but I'm not sure I get it. Is this a hyper-personalizable newsreader? Or something different? Why should I care?

(Not trying to be confrontational, just require some more basic explanation than the site requires.)
posted by hifiparasol at 12:23 AM on February 8, 2007


(and by "requires," of course, I mean "provides.")
posted by hifiparasol at 12:23 AM on February 8, 2007


The idea is that you can combine and filter feeds. For example say you were into ipods, you could make a feed that consists of all MetaFilter posts that contain the word ipod or apple, all AskMe posts that are tagged with ipod, popular del.icio.us bookmarks that are tagged ipod, and flickr photosets tagged ipod. Then you could just have that one feed in your newsreader and be able to follow that topic on all those sites from one place.
posted by Rhomboid at 12:27 AM on February 8, 2007


One good example I saw was a filter for apt. hunting on craigslist with parameters you could tweak.
You should be able to rig up some price watch tools as well. I'm looking forward to playing with the Amazon API.
posted by 2sheets at 12:35 AM on February 8, 2007


Wow, that is very cool. Thanks, Rhomboid (and 2sheets).
posted by hifiparasol at 12:43 AM on February 8, 2007


This is a cool UI, but is really limiting if you're a programmer and used to more powerful tools. I'm trying to create a mash-up of two Amazon RSS feeds - one that shows the current Gold Box deals, and one that shows your wishlist - and finds the things on your wishlist that are currently on sale. However, there's really no way to do this since you: 1) cannot extract arbitrary information from an RSS item (like, say, an Amazon ASIN) and 2) cannot find the intersection of two feeds (only the union).

The super-cool add on to this would be to allow plugins for the boxes you see, that accept an arbitrary number of inputs, some configuration, and produce a single output. I could write a plugin that, for example, extracts an ASIN from a feed URL. I write this plugin as a web service and give Yahoo the URL to my service, the number of feed inputs it takes (one in this case) and any user-definable parameters (none in this case), and voila - my box shows up in the 'user defined operators' part of the Yahoo UI for non-programmers to use.
posted by bbuda at 1:40 AM on February 8, 2007


Breaking Bulletin:

Graphical interface allows programmers and non-programmers alike to configure a program to do trivial tasks in a restrictive manner that is totally constrained by the inadequacy of the interface for configuration. More on the Evening News at 11 – Xeni Jardin will be here with us in the studio to triumphantly cry "OMG HAX".
posted by blasdelf at 1:55 AM on February 8, 2007 [3 favorites]


A fun app, if perhaps not nearly as monumental as some of Rhomboid's linked links proclaim. But it is simple to use, and nice-lookin, and will certainly stimulate more net innovation. Some similar services, dapper and openkapow.com can screenscrape regular data (not just formated rss) and let you play with it. You could even take that data as an rss feed and stick that that in your pipes, if you were so inclined.
posted by MetaMonkey at 1:57 AM on February 8, 2007


blasdelf: "Breaking Bulletin:

Graphical interface allows programmers and non-programmers alike to configure a program to do trivial tasks in a restrictive manner that is totally constrained by the inadequacy of the interface for configuration.
"

In the glory days of the late 90's, fortunes were invested and blown on far, far less.

IPO by Saturday or STFU!
posted by PeterMcDermott at 3:23 AM on February 8, 2007


[this is Yahoo!]
posted by emelenjr at 4:37 AM on February 8, 2007


Now we just need to hook it into Quartz Composer to produce graphical pipes too.
posted by schwa at 5:04 AM on February 8, 2007


Well it's dead now.
posted by delmoi at 5:23 AM on February 8, 2007


Did yahoo just get slashdotted over this thing?

I loves the power of Web2.0h.
posted by Jimbob at 5:46 AM on February 8, 2007


What was that I just tripped over? Was that my dick?

Cool.
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 6:13 AM on February 8, 2007


*lays on the ground and stares at the sky*

My god, it's beautiful.
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 6:38 AM on February 8, 2007


Somehow, I read the post as "The Internet as a series of Popes."

I'm sorely disappointed.
posted by Freen at 7:30 AM on February 8, 2007 [1 favorite]


Already down?! Poor Yahoo. You should always overprovision your server resources by a factor of 10 for a launch.... you can always take machines away later.
posted by lupus_yonderboy at 8:52 AM on February 8, 2007


It's not loading at all now. The pipes must be clogged.
posted by underdog at 9:22 AM on February 8, 2007


Breaking Bulletin:

Graphical interface allows programmers and non-programmers alike to configure a program to do trivial tasks in a restrictive manner that is totally constrained by the inadequacy of the interface for configuration. More on the Evening News at 11 – Xeni Jardin will be here with us in the studio to triumphantly cry "OMG HAX".


I'm being handed something... from Metafilter, a news flash, apparently official: A Web 2.0 application was called overhyped for the first time ever at 1:55 a.m. Pacific Standard Time, 4:55 a.m. Eastern Standard Time, some 478 minutes ago.

removes black-framed glasses
posted by dw at 9:52 AM on February 8, 2007 [1 favorite]


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

He he he. I admit it, I laughed.
posted by IronLizard at 10:01 AM on February 8, 2007


neat
posted by cell divide at 10:01 AM on February 8, 2007


Well, for what it's worth, the cutesy error message about the site being down is very Web 2.0.
posted by arto at 10:36 AM on February 8, 2007


Very Bloglines, even.
posted by mendel at 12:51 PM on February 8, 2007


I learned about this upon arising some 5-1/2 hours ago, and I hadn't gotten more than a glimpse at the front page before they went down. However, it appeared to be putting a frontend on something like SimplePie (see DynamicDrive's RSS Display Boxes or in the same headspace as FeedDigest. Both of them seem to be having problem keeping up with demand.

I think this is gonna be pretty big. Seems to me that it is about creating your own version of popurls where YOU decide which sites to monitor.

Or I could be all wet.
posted by spock at 12:57 PM on February 8, 2007


I tinkered with it for about three hours last night. My first pipe translated all of Metafilter's 'batshitinsane' posts to French. Meh. My second fetched events from upcoming.org and ran a title and location search on flickr; I was stunned when it actually found photos of shows, insta-lastnightsparty.

Overall, it reminded me a lot of XML Pipelines.

Out of the gate, it's a really cool service, but it's begging for some sort of API to allow people to upload their own modules. I was lamenting the fact that I couldn't find a module to run a simple XSL transform. If they extended their URLBuilder module, I could simply write my own web service to do that and host it on my own site. Not being able to POST the output of a module to a web service seems like a big limitation.

It seems if they added that functionality the entire service could be transformed from simply viewing things to doing things.
posted by Loser at 3:25 PM on February 8, 2007


Blah blah blah. Future, now. Got it.

Who wants a latte?
posted by oxford blue at 4:22 AM on February 9, 2007


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