Yahoo! Pipes

Last night Jeremy announced Yahoo! Pipes. The news spread fast and now the site is down.

Before it went down I played with Pipes a bit last night. What amazed me the most from the start is that it isn’t a flash app, all HTML and JavaScript. Yahoo! has recently lost some well known names (like Simon Willison and Dustin Diaz), but obviously still has some very talented teams.

Tim O’Reilly is pretty excited about it:

Yahoo!’s new Pipes service is a milestone in the history of the internet.

That’s a pretty bold thing for Tim to say. You know this quote will be making the rounds for quite some time and if for some reason Pipes breaks (pun disclaimer here) then people will be reminding him about it.

My gut feeling is that Pipes will likely be a hit. And not just because people will be using it, but because it has raised the bar for others. Bonus points for keeping with the Unix pipes approach and making it easy for non-programmers. Plus, this is something that Google hasn’t done. It sounds lame, but sometimes it felt like Yahoo! was getting stuck in the mud by trying to catch up to Google.

For more discussion on Pipes Jeremy’s announcement links to several blog posts.

Good job guys, now get the pipes cleared up and back on line.

The worst thing about Yahoo! Pipes may be the flood of bad plumbing puns that we’ll be reading for the next few days.