Tuesday, 10 April 2007
Yahoo! Desktop Pipes?
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I meet the Yahoo pipes team recently at Etech 07 and gave them a heads up about using there already established Yahoo Widgets to create the perfect flow setup. There widget engine already has access to pretty much everything on your desktop and it has an authenticated path back to the main server via the Y! Login system. It also has many APIs hooks into different desktop applications such as Outlook, iTunes, Winamp, along with your standard File system, System, etc. Another benefit of Yahoo Widgets is that its also running all the time so you can schedule pipes to start when ever you like. Now hows this for an example Yahoo!
A Pipeline which looks in my outlook calendar for birthdays. When there is one within 3 days of the date, it will look through Flickr for that person and create a custom e-card ready for me to review and hit send. Even if you left out the search through Flickr, it would still be a nice pipe to have.
I didn't even mention what crazy things could be done with Yahoo Desktop search or the Attention type things which could be done with the Yahoo Toolbar. Guys got to have his secrets.
I did also raise the question of Yahoo Pipes using XPROC or some other standard to export pipelines from Yahoo pipes to something else. It was obvious this was not ever really thought about, but they seemed keen to make the underlining xml for the pipes available soon.
Its honestly amazing that Yahoo have not taken the lead on this already. They have all the pieces in the right place but are stalling for some reason. Maybe they need more people working on this?
Bradley Horowitz did a good job of reminding the Pipes team that pipes and pipelines are exciting and maybe some of the most interesting stuff Yahoo!'s done in years. I have
Unfortunately if Yahoo! Were to roll out a flow system. It would be mainly proprietary and non-standard, which goes against the flow idea really.
