Put that in your pipe
I’ve been spending way too much time lately playing with Yahoo Pipes. It really is one of the most addictive Web 2.0 apps I’ve ever seen. It also has the potential to be one of the most disruptive. As Yahoo adds features and users take advantage of the power of drag-and-droup remixing, I could see this becoming the engine for user-created services that rival Digg, Netvibes, Techmeme and countless other commercial services. Will this ever really happen? Probably not. Despite the fact that Pipes makes creating mashups and remixes incredibly easy, it’s still pretty geeky, and is unlikely to ever reach a Youtube-like critical mass. But that doesn’t really matter. To casual developers, would-be mashers and the like, it’s nothing short of a revolution. Oh, and I’ve already come up with one useful pipe. Consumer Reports on Safety now includes a Recalls sidebar that takes the latest press releases from the CPSC and FDA, filters out those that aren’t recall-related and sorts the rest in rev-chron order. Very basic, but the kind of thing that would have been a pain to do pre-Pipes. With Pipes, it was done in about 10 minutes. Sweet.
