Pipes, five days later

Wednesday, February 14, 2007 by Dave Winer.

Richard MacManus writes about Pipes. It has the chicken and egg problem, the same one every programming language has when its new, there's not much interesting data to operate on. In this case, the target is the huge, rich base of RSS feeds, which is designed to work with one kind of aggregator, a River of News, and if you structured Pipes around that -- a filtration process for a river, it might bear some immediate fruit, but its built on a different model. 

It assumes that each feed can be dealt with as a procedure call, which according to the REST philosophers, it can, but in practice, feeds don't take parameters, so they're the least interesting kinds of procedures, like clock.now in UserTalk. Sure there are some verbs that build on that verb, date.month, date.year and date.dayOfWeek, but nowhere near as much as verbs that have rich parameter lists, which are like the gateways that Tim O'Reilly and Jon Udell are so excited about.  

See XML-RPC for Newbies for background; a Pipes that could do XML-RPC could be interesting, esp because the Metaweblog API is an XML-RPC application, and is widely supported by blogging tools and CMSes. 

In the RSS world, and therefore in Pipes, there's no way to tell if items in two feeds are talking about the same thing. The best you can hope for is keyword serendipity, which all the demos so far do, and those make for unsatisfying demos, because you know you couldn't deploy a useful app out of the concepts they illustrate. Very much like the early demos for HyperCard, Marimba, and my own Frontier.  

Now it's possible that a company like Yahoo, with its diverse flows of information, and nearly universal support of RSS, could add enough metadata to their feeds to be sure two items in different feeds were talking about the same thing, and then we'd be somewhere interesting. However at that point, I'd like a nice procedural language, something like Python's treatment of XML-RPC, not the visually appealing but information sparse IDE that so many marketing people fall in love with, but not many programmers actually use.