Metafluence

A brief reintroduction to Yahoo! Pipes - Part 5 of 5

For those just joining this series, here’s the links to the previous posts: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4.

As a final piece in a five part series, we’ll look to the future of Yahoo! Pipes and beyond this lone service. I recently had the pleasure of participating in a group discussion about this service. And one of the early observations that Marshall made was that there are many tools that can be used in combination with Pipes. And, as rad as Yahoo! Pipes is, it becomes significantly more powerful when you combine it with other services. Here’s a list of a few of those services:

Dapper

Desired data doesn’t come in a feed? Not a problem with Dapper. Dapper is one of the best services to combine with Pipes because it creates feeds out of web pages that don’t offer them.

FeedDigest

Like a simplified Pipes, FeedDigest offers a variety of feed manipulation options.

Feedburner

As cool as Pipes is, it doesn’t help you track the number of subscribers or the popularity of items in your feed. Fear not, Feedburner does just that and more.

Feed reader

There are a host of feed readers available out there for your desktop or web browser. Readers are one of the best ways to consume information feeds, such as a list of blogs.

Speculation about where Yahoo! may take Pipes

Yahoo! may acquire some of these other feed services to build out a more complete feed services. In the not too distant future, they’ll need to figure out how to monetize the service. Reliability and freshness seems to be important part of the feed economy. Perhaps charging a premium for delivery could be a solution. A membership to popular published pipes could be a viable model. I know I would pay $20 a month to have fresh, always on feeds.

Maybe Yahoo! will mine the various applications for Pipes that the users create and build their own services around popular pipes that could be ad and/or subscription supported.

To truly set up a business that generates revenue from aggregating, manipulating, and mashing up feeds, one would need a copy of Yahoo! Pipes running on your own servers for reliability and security. Maybe they could provide enterprise solutions like the Google Appliance.

From plumbing to circuitry

Right now, I think the plumbing metaphor is an appropriate one. It takes a lot of work to create a feed based information stream. You have to inspect it carefully for leaks and adding sections to the pipe can be time-consuming. In the not too distant future, I think circuitry makes a better metaphor. Circuit boards are made by connecting smaller circuits to make a larger, new circuit. As we establish proven patterns, manipulating the data stream will become a discipline of assembling smaller patterns into a larger, more complex ones. That metaphor may not be relevant to the feed-based information streaming world for as long as 10 years from now, but it doesn’t take a prophet to see the writing on the wall.

Hopefully this brief introduction to Yahoo! Pipes has been helpful enough to spark your interest in the service. Dawn captured some of the notes (and added great ideas of her own :) from our group discussion last week and we decided to start meeting regularly as a feed user group. We’ll be setting up a Google Group this week and if you’re interested in coming to a meeting, drop me a comment below. We’re going to keep attendance limited to people with a true interest in this area, so if we don’t know each other well, share a few things about your interest in a feed user group.