Valentin's Blog

Google Video has a talk about Yahoo Pipes. In general its a nice and gentle introduction to pipes, I found four tidbits of information mainly about the future plans of Pipes very interesting:

• In the new future they plan to allow you to add your own webservices as modules. 
• They are looking into ways to allow you to safely build Pipes on your private, password protected data (such as emails, calendars etc). Although it sounded like this is still quite a bit off.
• Yahoo Pipes is internally build on top of XML; its agnostic to whether its RSS or XML/RDF.  In the beginning they put the focus on RSS to make the tools easier to understand.  Not sure whether this is good news - processing RDF as XML really is neither easy nor powerful (compared to processing it as RDF).
• In general they struggle with the Power vs. Simplicity tradeoff; for example that led them to postpone the release of a database like "join" module for XML files.

Sadly they did not speak about the business case behind Yahoo Pipes, how Yahoo plans to earn money with this service.

Labels: Mashup, SemanticWeb, Web