Pipes investigation

Thursday, February 08, 2007 by Dave Winer.

I see that Yahoo has a new web app, called Pipes, that looks to me like a feed construction kit. 

It takes RSS inputs, processes them in ways that are specified by the user, and produces feeds as its output. 

How useful is this? Not sure. In all the years that I've used RSS apps, I've never wanted this functionality. But then I never wanted Feedburner either, and that's proven very popular.  

One of the first things I want to know is what is the quality of the RSS output they produce? Did they, like Apple did with iTunes, add a lot of proprietary stuff to their RSS? Ive been looking for some output on the web, but so far haven't found any. I'm optimistic because Yahoo has been an outstanding RSS comunity member. 

Note: the server is back up, although slow, at 8:20AM Pacific. The RSS they generate looks fine.  

At 10:40AM it's down again. 

From a quick persual of the functionality last night and the fact that the server isn't responding right now (5:45AM Pacific), it seems this app uses lots of CPU on the server.  

I agree with Nik and Richard that this is an application platform, and that Pipes users are likely to be fairly technical scripting-level users.  

Clearly it should take OPML as input, that's the usual way of exchanging lists of feeds. 

I'm interested in knowing what other Scripting News readers have learned from experimenting with Pipes.