Pipes: Remixing the web
Another sporadic blog update, and again about work…
My colleagues and I have just launched Pipes after many months of hard work, and Im really pleased with what we’ve created. I think its got a lot of possibilities and we’ve only begun to scratch the service.
“Pipes is a service platform for processing well-structured data
such as RSS, Atom and RDF feeds in a Web-based visual programming
environment. Developers can use Pipes to combine data sources and
user input into mashups without having to write code. These mashups,
analagous in some ways to Unix pipes, can power badges on personal
publishing sites, provide core functionality for existing or new Web
applications, or serve as reusable components within the Pipes
platform itself.” (thanks Maciej)
While we’re a small team (Pasha, Edward and I working across the whole system and design), I focused mainly on the editor which has been fun and frustrating at the same time. I’ll try and comment some more on that particularly working on the “line” connectors which I hope people will enjoy 
Others who’ve talked about the release (and provided great context for where this has come from and can go to):
- Tim O’Reilly
- Jeremy Zawodney
- My boss’ boss Bradley Horowitz
Enough for now… we’re pushing changes as I type…
February 8th, 2007 at 7:57 am
[...] The team themselves are the best resources for more info: – Pasha, who deserves all the credit for both the idea and leading the team, – Edward, whose passion is matched only by his technical skill, – Jonathan, the man behind what may be the slickest AJAX application on the web, – Kevin, who joined recently but completely took the design to a new level in a matter of weeks – and Daniel, without whom this would be just another great idea that never would have seen the light of day. [...]
February 8th, 2007 at 8:53 am
[...] Jonathan Trevor: Whom I’ve told numerous people is the guy who codes faster than I can design (he’s responsible for the editor) [...]
February 8th, 2007 at 9:34 am
[...] Yahoo! Pipes was built by Pasha Sadri, Ed Ho, Jonathan Trevor, Kevin Cheng, and Daniel Raffel. I work in the row of cubes right beside the team and it’s been inspiring to watch Pipes go from idea to reality (I was lucky enough to work closely with Ed and Jonathan last year when we released the Checkmates prototype at eTech). [...]
February 8th, 2007 at 10:59 am
Pipes…
…
February 8th, 2007 at 3:41 pm
[...] Pipes: Remixing the Web by Jonathon Trevor, another of the Pipes developers [...]
February 8th, 2007 at 7:06 pm
Yahoo! Pipes…
Last night Jeremy announced Yahoo! Pipes. The news spread fast and now the site is down.
Before it went down I played with Pipes a bit last night. What amazed me the most from the start is that it isn’t a flash app, all HTML and JavaScript. Ya…
February 9th, 2007 at 2:17 am
Congratulations on the pipes! I can’t wait to see it if it ever comes back up from all the demand.
February 9th, 2007 at 8:36 am
I’d definitely love to see/understand the code for those lines – I’ve been dreaming of having them for an interface on a website for a quite while now.
Very impressed.
February 9th, 2007 at 10:45 am
[...] I just came across pipes which Tim O’Reilly calls a milestone in the history of the Internet. pipes allows a (non-)programmer to combine, filter, and aggregate feeds from different data sources like RSS, atom and XML. Somehow similar to the good old unix pipe but with a nice drag and drop editor (supposed to work even on Windows). The project was realised by my former colleague Jonathan and his team at Yahoo! [...]
February 12th, 2007 at 12:30 pm
It’s fascinating. It’s a virtual Boolean playground.
Needs a manual. A guide for the every-man, the idiots of the world. It’s not intuitive — not that that’s a bad thing, mind you.
Very interesting potential. I’d love to see it play better with other search engines.
I’m also looking for a way to pass OR list of variables around, and to pass phrases — using quotation marks seems fine when building it, but when one goes back to edit, they convert to something else and the equations error out.
You have birthed something neat.
February 12th, 2007 at 5:57 pm
Hi,
just wanted to add that I’m totally baffled by the easy of use in pipes.
How do you actually DO the drawing and the wiring effect?
Man thats just magic.
Is it possible to point my to some good (!) tutorial on using the canvas and drawing via js?
Or even some technical background on the pipes implementation itself.
Until then, I’ll try learning using Firebug :9
Thanks fpr opening my eyes,
Mark
February 21st, 2007 at 10:44 am
Congratulations on the pipes! Really great idea & job. You guys are fantastic.
August 12th, 2007 at 6:41 pm
[...] ol’ caveat. This is not a finished product! Edward, Daniel, Jonathan, Pasha, and Kevin have created a beautiful platform but this is just the first step in an exciting [...]