She Blinded me with. . . Pipes!
I had nothing to do with it whatsoever, but I’ve been watching from the sidelines with near-amazement a new Yahoo! service called Pipes.
It’s a stunning visual editor for web data services - reducing the friction required to normalize multiple data inputs, apply operations and parameters to them, and extract standardized outputs. The benefit, of course, is to enable unexpected data mashups and new kinds of visualizations, along the lines I’ve talked about before here. Jeremy Z and Tim O’Reilly do it better justice than I do. I’m delighted to see a few others are picking up on it - to the point, it appears, that the service is down at the moment.
Congratulations to Pasha (who seems to have taken the opportunity to launch a blog) and the rest of the team that made this happen.
