Yahoo recently released a feed aggregator service called “Pipes”:
Pipes is a hosted service that lets you remix feeds and create new data mashups in a visual programming environment. The name of the service pays tribute to Unix pipes, which let programmers do astonishingly clever things by making it easy to chain simple utilities together on the command line.
There is a rapidly-growing body of well-structured data available online in the form of XML feeds. These feeds range from simple lists of blog entries and news stories to more structured, machine-generated data sources like the Yahoo! Maps Traffic RSS feed. Because of the dearth of tools for manipulating these data sources in meaningful ways, their use has so far largely been limited to feed readers.
More than a decade ago, I read a book on MIT’s “Media Lab”in which one of the predictions was that someday we would have “personalized newspapers” that would be tailored to our interests. In many respects, this is exactly the direction in which the Internet is evolving and “Pipes” is simply the latest manifestation of the trend.
As processing power, memory, storage and bandwidth have fallen in price, many ideas that were simply “interesting” in the past have now become practical realities. This week, Intel previewed its “Era of Tera” next generation architecture, and I have no idea what kind of applications that it will make possible – probably, it will be obvious in hindsight when they appear.
The Internet is still evolving, seemingly faster than ever.
