My feed reader this morning was full of Pipes: several of the blogs to which I subscribe included enthusiastic posts about Yahoo Pipes. For example, Read/Write Richard describes Pipes as an RSS remixer.
Richard refers to posts he made a couple of years ago. Pipes seems a little different from what he was foretelling then, though. It’s not the kind of end-user friendly tool he was writing about in 2005. It may turn in to one, although I doubt it. He also anticipated that Google (i.e. not Yahoo) would be the front-runner, along with… PubSub.
I suspect that Richard and others are right to be perky about Pipes. I am not, at least not yet. I tried using it at work this morning, and found it slow, unintuitive, and prone to giving strange error messages. I tried it on my laptop just now, and found that Pipes is “clogged” due to heavy demand. I’ll give it another try later.
In the meantime, thanks to Darwin Bell, Flickr, and Creative Commons for the photo.