DISQUS

Mathew's comments: Yahoo’s Pipes goes down the tubes

  • webomatica · 2 years ago
    I'd obviously love to check it out too. It's appealing to me because while web 2.0 is partly about user created content, I think what's coming next is users being able to create dynamic, rich websites themselves. (pligg lets anyone create a digg). This seems to be one step in that direction.
  • Steven Hodson · 2 years ago
    I'm with you Mathew. I have been reading about this all day and I still can't figure out the why of it ... other than being cool I just don't see the value.
  • Mathew · 2 years ago
    I agree, Jason -- but how many people are going to want to put together their own flow chart of RSS feeds to build a site? Very few, I would imagine.

    To me it looks more like a toy for a small handful of geeks (not that there's anything wrong with that, of course).

    And thanks for saying that, Steven. I thought I was the only one who wasn't getting it.
  • Leigh · 2 years ago
    Seems that the particularly early adopterish (that so isn't a word) products that mass-market players launch (i.e. Google Base) don't generally hit the mark. Maybe they should stop trying to continue their strategy of letting entrepreneurs do the bleeding edge innovating and see what works before they take it over and re-launch as a mass-market play. The Web marketing equivalent of letting someone else throw the pasta against the wall and seeing what sticks.
  • Anne · 2 years ago
    Maybe only geeks will want to wire together the RSS feeds but once they do, other people can take advantage of the remixed feeds. So you can imagine some people who just assemble pieces, some people who integrate data (via something like pipes), and some people who actually build the software that allows the data integration.

    So I see this as being one more piece that puts in place the infrastructure for everyone to make mashups.
  • Mathew · 2 years ago
    I think you are probably right, Anne. And I hope someone puts together some that I can use, because I wandered around in Pipes for awhile this morning trying to figure out how to do it and it made my head hurt, so I stopped :-)
  • Dominic Jones · 2 years ago
    My head hurts, too. I've been back three times since this was first announced, and it's just too hard.

    Tim O'Reilly said it was programming for the masses. I got excited about that. But now it feels less like programming for the mass and more like masses of programming.

    The idea is hugely compelling to me. That's why I keep going back, hoping I can figure it out. Sure, I can copy someone else's application, but there's no fun in that.

    Guess I'll have to wait for someone to come up with the dummies version.
  • Mathew · 2 years ago
    My feelings exactly, Dominic.
  • webomatica · 2 years ago
    Oh well, I'm still really impressed with Pipes. But I probably got it quicker as I do Flash ActionScript and web design (both relatively simple stuff compared to actual programming).

    But still, I can't make heads or tails of the UI in Second Life for creating objects...
  • Mathew · 2 years ago
    Glad to hear you say that about Second Life too, Jason. That one makes my head hurt too :-)