Yahoo Pipes launched in beta yesterday (February 8, 2007) as a dashboard for remixing existing RSS feeds. Pipes provides a very geek-centric yet compelling application, as it empowers any user to create a custom feed. Though this product might seem simple to
people within the web 2.0 industry or the blogosphere, I still feel it has a long way to go to make it easy and understandable to a mainstream user, like my mother, bless her heart. Furthermore, Pipes had a troublesome launch day as it experienced major performance issues which were highlighted by RSS-czar David Winer. Personally, I encountered the messaging shown in the screen-shot below several times.
Judging by the flood of blogosphere activity surrounding the beta launch of Pipes, I speculate that several bloggers (minus myself) were given a preview of Pipes prior to launch. O'Reilly Radar had this to say of Pipes:
"It democratizes web programming, making it easier for people to have more control over the internet information services they consume, and providing a general-purpose platform for interacting with sites that is more powerful than the browser or feed-reader alone, but without requiring full programming skills."
While Nik Cubrilovic reported for TechCrunch by saying:
"Pipes can take any feed as input, and combined with the already available list of functions proves to be very powerful - my mind is still buzzing thinking about all that can be done with Pipes."
Anil Dash showcased Pipes and went on to look at other mashup applications. For more perspective on the launch of Yahoo Pipes check out its cluster on techmeme.
Bottom-line: Yahoo Pipes is an interesting new feed mashup application that allows users to create custom feeds. In launching as a beta it is currently a geek toolkit since it probably will not be easy to use or compelling to a mainstream audience.
