Saturday, 24 February 2007
This isn’t user-generated content, it’s user-controlled content
« What was waiting for me in my inbox today... | Main | Is Amazon services perfect for the pipeline future? »Bill Thompson has been thinking about Pipelines too. His post is sparked by Yahoos Pipes but he also thinks about the bigger context of pipelines. Here's some key quotes which I found very interesting.
We have had mashups for a while now, like the projects coming out of the BBC’s own Backstage project, but they generally require some programming ability and usually combine two sources at a time, like the BBC News and Google Maps mashup in Ben O’Neill’s excellent news map. Pipes take things much further. This isn’t user-generated content, it’s user-controlled content. And unlike personalised pages or simple feed subscriptions it really does put control into the hands of the user. Pipes mark the point at which remixing online content and creating mashups becomes something that anyone can do. If you can describe what you want then you can build it. It is also, of course, a collaborative environment, at least for now. You can take someone else’s pipe and ‘clone’ it to make your own, with no hint that there could be copyright or intellectual property issues here.
The idea of sharing pipelines is essential, without this your back in the world of programming. Because your just chaining things together, realisticlly there shouldn't be any copyright issues ever. This is another reason why I really think this should be a XML format aka not some propitery binary format. Allow anyone to just write it if they like but also allow others to build fluid interfaces for user-controlled or user-generated pipelines.
