“Rewire the Web.”
“Pipes is an interactive feed aggregator and manipulator. Using Pipes, you can create feeds that are more powerful, useful and relevant.”
Some very interesting possibilities here. Apparently the buzz brought the site down the same day it was launched, as reported here. The site is back up this morning. I’m mightily intrigued, even after a brief glance. Services like these are not only cool for their functionality; they’re also effective at breaking down conceptual barriers. And it wouldn’t take too much to reconceptualize Pipes itself as a kind of information “game.”
The site’s already playful. There’s a section called “Hot Pipes,” for example, that features user-created content that others have “cloned” for themselves–i.e., pipes they’ve adopted. Here’s one example:
This Pipe takes the New York Times homepage, passes it thru Content Analysis and uses the keywords to find Photos at Flickr.
Daniel Raffel made the pipe. The description page allows you to run the pipe or clone the pipe. You can subscribe to the pipe. In a nifty little widget on the side, you can also view how the pipe was made. Pipes’ front page tells us that Daniel’s pipe has been run 5514 times and cloned 375 times. (Stats and thermometers make everyone happy.)
More from the site:
02.07.07: What Is Pipes?
Pipes is a hosted service that lets you remix feeds and create new data mashups in a visual programming environment. The name of the service pays tribute to Unix pipes, which let programmers do astonishingly clever things by making it easy to chain simple utilities together on the command line.
Philosophy Behind the Project
There is a rapidly-growing body of well-structured data available online in the form of XML feeds. These feeds range from simple lists of blog entries and news stories to more structured, machine-generated data sources like the Yahoo! Maps Traffic RSS feed. Because of the dearth of tools for manipulating these data sources in meaningful ways, their use has so far largely been limited to feed readers. Read more
Play, share, store, explore, create. A good lesson plan for any day’s class meeting, I’d say.
Update: in the time it took me to write this blog post, a new feature appeared (or re-appeared): “pipe preview.” Impressive. I also took a peek at the “view pipe” function. Could this be an introduction to programming for non-programmers?
“Stats and thermometers make everyone happy”
Gosh, I wish I had written that one.
Sounds interesting.