Have you piped the internet yet?

Pipes. They are the next generation of mashups - yeah, if mashups present a programmable web, pipes take it one step further - they bring it to the layman, who doesn't necessarily have programming skills. Pipes bring to us that version of the web, which we create by searching, filtering, slicing and dicing it to make it look the way we like it - all using easy drag and drop tools. If Yahoo! could get one step ahead of Google anywhere, it's through its Yahoo! Pipes service, which offers a pipe editor interface.

Tim O'Reilly's article claims "Yahoo!'s new Pipes service is a milestone in the history of the internet." There are dissenters too, like Tim Anderson,who argues that Yahoo! Pipes lacks a business model and allows users to strip the websites off the advertisements which help them run, leaving the internet robbed off its chief driver. Well, I'll say, it's a great idea - let's not nip it in the bud! It's not even a year since it launched and it's going to be in beta for longer - let's give the innovators and business moguls of Yahoo! and Google and Microsoft time to think out how they could cultivate a winner out of Pipes. At the least, let's hope that Google and Microsoft come up with clones to take on Yahoo, instead of killing this innovation.

Pipes are just like giving the crayons and the paper to the little boy. The little boy starts drawing - random lines and different colors initially, but not so much a picture yet. Things don't work easily at first, but he's not one who gives up so easily. He pulls up a magazine and starts browsing through the pictures until he finds one which he can copy. Well, for us, NYT through Flickr is such a good picture to start with. When you click on the link, you see a map peppered with red dots. They all represent pictures from Flickr. How are these pictures relevant? Well, a New York Times news feed has been "piped" with Flickr using keywords, to give the pictures related to the New York Times content. Cool, ha?!

The little boy is impressed. Just above the map in the NYT-Flickr pipe, he finds a 'Clone' button and clicks on it. He's led to a Pipes editor. It's not so intimidating because it looks just like a Visio flowchart editor, or even a diagram object in Powerpoint. Well, he feels NYT is pretty high standard for him - he can't digest that as much as he does 'The Hindu'. He's been growing with the paper, and the paper, with him. He goes to the The Hindu webpage, and clicks on the 'XML' RSS feeds button. There comes a list of all The Hindu's feeds. He chooses Kerala and replaces NYT's feed in the pipe. There you go - He's just created his own pipe! Save it as a different pipe, and run it - That's all he needs to do to get a feel of how many articles in The Hindu have photos that correspond to them on flickr. Zoom into Kerala on the map, and have fun!