Yahoo Pipes

I made my first pipe today at Yahoo Pipes, which takes our Folkstreams recently additions feed and finds Flickr images that correspond to the folkloric subject categories associated with each entry, rolls them into the feed. I'm not sure if I constructed it properly of if it's useful, but it works, the Flickr images do show up in an element of the RSS item for each film.

It's a fascinating concept, although a feed mashup is not a new concept, Pipes is very broad, powerful and slick. It borrows from several novel websites, shades of Ning where users build technology using Lego-brick-like software components. Of course, it's like Unix, a set of simple tools with standard input and output that can be endlessly combined into new, useful tools. It also draws upon open source software development, since others can see how you constructed a pipe, copy it and make it their own to study or build their own tools on.

Pipes is a social network version of a RSS feed mashup service. The idea of mashing up RSS feeds to create a new feed, combined from other filtered feeds is nothing new. But sharing the feeds and the construction of feeds with other users in a social network environment like social bookmarking, etc. is novel. You can do the normal social networking things, aggregate most popular pipes. Any kind of content item can be social networked and then the aggregates derived from that usage data.

It definitely has shades of open source since you can see how any pipe is made; shades of wiki in that you anyone can study, edit and build the application from within the application through a language. It is similar to emacs or even Blender (which exposes its interface and engine to Python, so new interface elements and functionality can be added by users). Users becoming software builders is a growing phenomena, just as wiki showed readers could become authors, all part of a general trend toward what is called professional-amateurism.