Everyone is talking about the new service from
Yahoo - Pipes.
Pipes is cool. It
does a lot of stuff. Mainly it lets you take RSS (Ray Ozzie has referred to RSS as the "
Unix pipe of the web") and literally pipe it. Through what? A series of services and transformations until it comes out look just like you want it.
Think of it as a super
FeedRinse.
Unfortunately though, it's not exactly useful 'out-of-the-box'. But that's ok - because it is more a piece of Internet plumbing than it is a consumer facing service. Which is strange considering it's coming from Yahoo!
My friend
Ian Forrester loves pipes. He has been talking about them for a long time. In fact he correctly noted that
Touchstone is a sort of pipeline. Data comes in from a set of Input Adapters, is processed by our engine for Personal Relevancy, Cache and Routing, and is then passed on to one or more Output adapters for presentation to the user.
Of course our pipe is not as flexible or configurable, but it
is immediately useful for consumers. It's interesting in fact that the first example that Yahoo provides (and
O'reilly catches on to) is the idea of using pipes to aggregate and filter news alerts.
But filtering is so 5 years ago.
Labels: alerts, collaborative filtering, ianforrester, Media 2.0, news reading, pipes, touchstone, yahoo
