cat RSS | <insert something awesome here>
I saw Pipes a while back during our internal hack lunches. Ever have one of those jaw dropping moments crossed with one of those “duh” moments? That’s basically what it was for me. A slick, intuitive interface for manipulating RSS in a way that leaves every UNIX geek out there saying, “that’s what we’ve been talking about for decades!”
Ed Ho has some details on his blog. That links to a longer O’Reilly post that goes into some depth on Pipes.
Play with it, it’s awesome. And check out Uncle Hulka en Francais.
February 8th, 2007 at 7:40 am
[...] cat rss | … by Ryan Kennedy [...]
February 8th, 2007 at 11:05 am
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 12th, 2007 at 9:43 am
As a technology demo (UI wise) I didn’t find it particularly intuitive but after fumbling around a bit I found it to be neat. What’s really interesting here is imagining how Yahoo is going to monetize it.
Off the top of my head I can imagine 2 scenarios. Yahoo could pipe all output through an ad module that inserts ads into the rss/json feed results. That would be a pretty lame effort.
What would be really cool is to pipe the output through some sort of behavioral analysis module. I would imagine this module would either augment or build a detailed user profile. After you get enough profiles you can segment the user base into target groups and sell premium advertising towards piped users. How that module would work is way more interesting than the clever UI.
February 12th, 2007 at 2:24 pm
It could make for an interesting ad delivery mechanism. Pipe your RSS through the context filter, kicking out keywords that are then piped through an ad system giving you an RSS feed of contextually relevant ads.
Given that this came out of Brickhouse, however, it remains to be seen whether or not Pipes is meant to generate cash or if it’s meant to generate new and interesting mashups that could themselves generate cash.
February 12th, 2007 at 6:55 pm
Ick. I wonder if ads around other people’s content (in this context) is even legal.
Whether Yahoo considers this and other rss tools as brand marketing or just a morale boosting project, I can think of plenty of examples of worse things to be working on, thats for sure!
Oh Wait ….
February 12th, 2007 at 10:20 pm
Yeah, that’s one thing that has come up as a concern in other blogs I’ve watched. Namely people becoming self-conscious about how their feeds get remixed. Imagine the reverse, a pipe that strips ads OUT of RSS feeds. Like AdBlock for RSS.
February 13th, 2007 at 8:49 am
Putting Ads in your RSS feed is basically the same as inserting ads to the end of email. Or maybe its like inserting and ad on the subject line of your email. Either way it leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
I think concerned content producers should put abstracts in the RSS feed instead of content in its entirety. Use RSS as a notification mechanism