Yesterday, Yahoo launched a new feed aggregator, manipulator, filterer. Pipes represents all my favorite things, in one place.
I’m not afraid to admit that at first visit, I had to squint a bit to see the emperor’s clothes. Now that I’ve given it a second, third, forth, fifth, and finally, a sixth chance (the app must be getting pounded – I was getting connection errors more than not,) I’m ready to say that Pipes is extremely cool.
I’m experimenting with the tool to output an aggregated group of foreign language feeds that I then run through BabbleFish to translate into something like English. It’s been buggy, but, again, I assume this is due to server load.
The translation aspect is only a small component of what makes this valuable. The feed manipulation options are impressive. Chris Saad of Touchstone calls Pipes a super Feed Rinse.
Pipes is not consumer friendly, though, and my reaction is a bit bipolar.
I imagine it will retain only a small percentage of the users currently exclaiming how cool it is. I’d even go a bit further out on the limb and opine that at least some (many) of the bloggers singing its praise aren’t actually creating pipes.
I don’t blame anybody there if I’m right. It’s probably important to note that you don’t have to create a pipe to use one. Anyone can subscribe [via rss] once a pipe is published.
But, it’s hard to ignore how geeky the interface is. Why do I need to drag an imaginary pipe to apply operators to my input and then to my output, for instance? This is like iTunes adding a virtual “peel here” sticker that needs to be drug/dropped every time a consumer buys an album.
I’d love to pipe their strange ranger interface through Electric Pulp. I think the output would be considerably more useful (a concept that they seem to be onboard with.) Who knows though? Maybe the unpopular truth that ugly converts applies double in the land of geek tools.
Either way, if you’re working on relevancy engines, I say carry on. Yahoo’s demographic on this one looks to be about the size of a dime (I just happen to be inside it.)