Yahoo Pipes: Is the Promise the Reality?

Workin’ on dem Yahoo Pipes…

Lots of buzz about Yahoo Pipes and the capability for non-developers to pull together disparate Web services, repackage and deliver them in new ways. One possible use-case is something I’m involved in right now with a client: they want to take seven blog feeds (yes…they have permission from each blogger), bring in a news service feed they’ve licensed and then deliver them — properly formatted and with a look-n-feel that matches *theirs* — into their online magazine.  This would’ve required people with propellers on their beanies to accomplish and it *appears* that Yahoo Pipes will enable this to happen without propeller intervention.

Here’s the kicker though: after reading Tim O’Reilly’s excellent post as well as Nik Cubrilovic’s post at Techcrunch, I was eager to give it a whirl…but the site has been offline all morning! After my post yesterday regarding my growing cautious optimism about relying on Web apps, the irony is not lost on me.

Still, my enthusiasm for the tools that are here and ones I know are coming are going to continue to accelerate our ability to leverage the Web and the Internet-as-a-platform in new and compelling ways. I’ve written about this before when discussing assembling a rich, internet application and my gut belief that Apple will position iWeb as a mass market, desktop publishing-like application for Web applications that’ll consume all of these new Web services remains as ones that fill me with hope.

Since Yahoo Pipes is a new deliverable and there’s A LOT of excitement about it — and thus everyone’s bangin’ on their servers probably causing my inability to get connected — but if more of us leverage Web services and create our own mashups that we bet our businesses or mission critical projects on, the damn stuff has gotta work!

UPDATE: After reading some comments on a post just now, it’s possible Yahoo did NOT launch last evening and this may yet be offline.