Blog: Richard Hackathorn

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Rewiring the Enterprise with Yahoo! Pipes

Every few years there is a technology innovation to which you just have this gut reaction of 'wow'. Yahoo! released its Pipes on Thursday. And, WOW!

As with many innovations, the elements of the innovations are not new or unique in of themselves. However, the synthesis is much more than the sum of the parts.

What are the elements of Yahoo! Pipes?

1) data flow diagrams with a nice web-based UI - nothing new!
2) publish-subscribe of data flow modules - nothing new!
3) flexible inputs and great output distribution - nothing new!
4) social network dynamic like Fickr and YouTube - again nothing new!

=> Yahoo! Pipes - awesome new!

Pipes is a bit hard to get into. Document is thin. So, be patient. Learn through examples.

See the example by Nik Cubrilovic of TechCrunch to understand the simplicity and power of Pipes. Subscribe to its RSS feed for your NewsGator. Then, go mash it up!

I created a simple Pipe for taking articles from both the US and UK sites of the Business Intelligence Network and filtering them on a user-specified topic. You can mash it up here!

So what? ...to business intelligence in the enterprise. This is a glimpse of the future for wiring the flow of enterprise data among employees, partners, suppliers, etc. A popular Pipes mash-up via web-service is next gen of that past-season adhoc spreadsheet via sneaker-net.

Posted by Richard Hackathorn on Saturday, 10 February 2007 | Permalink