This Yahoo! Pipes Post Guaranteed Pun-Free | February 12, 2007
by Jeb Boniakowski
I spent some time over the weekend playing with Yahoo! Pipes since I didn't really get a chance to last week. It looks pretty cool, and it's great to see that more and more people are starting to believe that non-programmers can build their own apps if they have the right tools.
My first reaction to Pipes is that the UI has a lot of slick features in it. I also can't believe the whole thing is Ajaxified. When I saw the screenshots I thought for sure it would have to be built in something like Flash. Kudos to the Pipes UI team. That is some really impressive stuff.
The blog posts around the Pipes launch have been interesting. Like Tim O'Reilly writing for Radar:
"But perhaps more significantly, to develop a mashup, you already needed to be a programmer. Yahoo! Pipes is a first step towards changing all that, creating a programmable web for everyone."
We might disagree that this is the first step, and we're pretty sure there are some others who would too, but hey, something about lifting boats and rising tides. This particular tide lately seems to approaching Bay of Fundy proportions.
More interestingly, we think Pipes is going to be another way to build new services to use with Proto. More on that when we get a chance to dig into it a little deeper. Or, make a Pipe and integrate it with Proto. That would be a great way to win one of our free iPods.
