How about you? Have you tried any of the new RSS Mashup Editors? What do you think of them?

On Thursday I was talking with Mark Lucovsky at Google and he was explaining why Google’s Mashup Editor doesn’t yet have the flashy UI that PopFly has. He reminded me of my experience with FrontPage and how that frustrated me everytime I hit a limitation of its editor. I’d drop into HTML, try to change things, and then the code would change or I’d be frustrated because it wouldn’t let me do what I wanted. Lucovsky says that’s why the Google Mashup Editor team hasn’t done a flashy UI yet. It’s the philosophy of the Google teams: to make sure you’ll always be able to do what you want to do and then put the purty UI onto it later to make it easier to use.

Sounds interesting, but wonder what the real devs who are playing with these tools are thinking? Of course I can already hear what Lucovsky is thinking: what are the new devs who are 14 to 20 thinking?

Comments

We’re waiting to hear back from Yahoo about the Pipes service vanishing from the Internet.

(UPDATE!: 5:40 pm ET – We just heard back from Yahoo, and this is their statement on the state of Yahoo Pipes:

]]> http://www.webpronews.com/yahoo-pipes-vanishes-2007-02/feed 1 http://www.webpronews.com/yahoo-pipes-the-internet-to-you-2007-02 http://www.webpronews.com/yahoo-pipes-the-internet-to-you-2007-02#comments Thu, 08 Feb 2007 11:50:38 +0000 WebProNews Staff http://www.webpronews.com/?p=35082 People using Yahoo Pipes will be able to mix and mashup data sources from all kinds of places on the Internet into combined feeds they can share with others.

Did Yahoo Join The Ted Stevens Society?

As a new effort, Yahoo Pipes will appeal to the more technologically comfortable people at first. The ability to combine information in a relatively easy fashion should quickly broaden the appeal of Pipes. Response to the recently launched Pipes from some of the most enthusiastic techie types probably was summed up best by publisher Tim O’Reilly, who lauded Pipes on the O’Reilly Radar blog:

Yahoo!’s new Pipes service is a milestone in the history of the internet. It’s a service that generalizes the idea of the mashup, providing a drag and drop editor that allows you to connect internet data sources, process them, and redirect the output. While it’s still a bit rough around the edges, it has enormous promise in turning the web into a programmable environment for everyone.

Yahoo calls Pipes "a hosted service that lets you remix feeds and create new data mashups in a visual programming environment." Fans of Unix and Linux who understand just how useful the pipe function can be in those operating systems will understand why Yahoo chose the name. Even a Yahoo competitor found himself impressed by Pipes. Google’s Matt Cutts, a fan of pipes at the command line, also became a fan of Yahoo Pipes despite hitting an issue with the new service:

I took it for a test drive right after Jeremy (Zawodny) posted about it and hit an error message partway through, but I’m sure they’ll get it smoothed over pretty quickly. I was able to save a “module” (which appears to be a little chunk of pipe processing which is connected to an RSS output). Then you can click publish and you get an obfuscated url back. I tested the obfuscated url and it generates RSS just fine; the test module I made is safely tucked into Google Reader now.

Zawodny had posted about Pipes, and commented on the error Cutts found. As expected it was fixed quickly. At its core, Pipes allows for mashups of RSS feeds. Those feeds can come from blogs and websites, along with plenty of other resources that allow people to create a feed based on a query, like a search at eBay that returns a list of auctions for Chicago Bears apparel. The real utility for Pipes will come when someone creates a Pipe of such usefulness that others will pick up on it and tweak it for their use. Pipes can be cloned and shared, and we expect those features will bring in more users as really great Pipes are created. We’ll be interested in seeing how our readers in the search and e-business communities put Pipes to use.

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