TomSoft

9 Month later: is Yahoo pipes a success?

October 30th, 2007

Microsoft Popfly has been publicly released two weeks ago, I’ve played a little bit with it: very impressive graphically, but it’s hard to do something really useful beyond the usual “get flickr pictures and show them in a cool way…”…

I was wondering is it because of the limitation of such tool, or because I’ve just not see them. So I made a little bit of research on Yahoo!Pipes.
 First, I must admit that even if less impressive graphically, Yahoo!Pipes seems much more useful at a first step. Maybe it’s more programmer oriented, but connection and the rest seems easiest to manage.
But then, I’ve tried to find some  interesting pipes: I’ve been through the list of Pipes, and hardly find something really useful. The most used pipe seems to be the ‘del.icio.us flavored web search”, by PashaSadri, which was run 45610 times. The second one, Badger, has been run 25654 times….

But for a so visible service like Pipes, by one of the top three internet companies, seems relatively low numbers, especially regarding the excitement generated at the launch time.

But the worst thing, is that it’s quite hard to find really useful stuff. Two options:

• It’s not possible to do “real” innovative things using such technology
• Service did not found his users yet. It’s just a question of time (and eventually user interface), and Microsoft Popfly could eventually take over this space.

My guess, it’s a little bit of the two: users don’t really interested by these, they already have plenty of tools, to do search, etc…So what is the value (fort them) to spend time to learn such thing?

Entry Filed under: Ajax, Yahoo