The Pipes Are Bursting!

Lots and lots of buzz this morning about Yahoo Pipes, which is being billed as “an interactive feed aggregator and manipulator” (manipulator sounds kind of evil, doesn’t it?). Anyway, I’m curious to try it out but it appears so are many other people as I’m getting an “unable to connect” message. Tim “Mr. Web 2.0″ O’Reilly expounds that Pipes is “a milestone in the history of the internet. It’s a service that generalizes the idea of the mashup, providing a drag and drop editor that allows you to connect internet data sources, process them, and redirect the output.” With a billing like that, no wonder the Pipes site is getting pounded.

Anil Dash is a little less enthusiastic, calling it an “an interesting and innovative new service” that lets people who are less tech-savvy combine different sources of online data.

“In this way, it’s possible for non-experts to create new web services for their own use or for public consumption. Pipes combines a remarkably sophisticated development environment with some core social features such as the ability to clone or share the web services you produce. The service is fairly approachable, but somewhat complex once you get just under the surface, and should be moderately successful while radically raising the bar for other tools in its category.”

When I get onto Pipes (hopefully later today), I give you my two cents but it looks intriguing. Anything that helps move RSS into the mainstream can only be a good thing!

Update: Yahoo now has a message when you try to visit the Pipes site: Our Pipes are clogged! We’ve called the plumbers! By the way, I hope the Pipes beta is better than the Yahoo Mail beta, which has huge growing pains.

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