Because a pipe would indicate the ability for water/data to flow in either direction. Let me explain…
Yahoo Pipes is described as a “Mashup builder” - I think that is half true. It can only do a part of the job (it’s only mashing up data from various data sources). The types of apps you could build from this are pretty limited, and lack true value. i.e. fancy aggregate news sites. This however, cannot cover all the different types of mashups a person would want to build.
Yahoo Pipes needs to be able to STORE data and PUSH data. We need “modules” that can call XML methods (ie. SOAP or REST). This shouldn’t happen only on-demand, we also need the ability to schedule these actions. This would would give you the ability to create some pretty cool tools. Tie this in with Amazon Mechanical Turk / Amazon Web Services and you could build a business entity without even having a webhost!
If they did this, it would then become the equivalent to Apples Automator for the Mac (which is pretty cool btw).
Some example usages
- On a daily basis, pull the RSS feed for my blogs comments, for each comment publish a Amazon Mechanical Turk job to have that item reviewed.
Every hour check the finished Mechanical Turk Jobs, then call the web service to accept or deny a given comment. - Pull the RSS feeds from both Major Nelsons Blog and the Xbox Live Marketplace, and whenever an item tagged as a theme pops up, send a webservice call to my web application DashboardThemes.com to place a “stub” entry for that given theme. (Maybe even dispatch the work of capturing a dashboard themes to AMT for a worker to capture and upload). Then send email me saying a moderation action required.
- Pull stock feeds from a RSS feed - if a given stock value changes drastically, issue a AMT job to have pre-selected analysts perform research on given news stories related around a stock and publish a written report. Query for results, publish results to a Stock news blog via a web service call to a wordpress blog.
- Pull the top videos from Digg, publish them to a Squidoo lens called “the top videos on digg today”. Or pull the comments from Digg and have a person on Amazon Mechanical Turk decide if its funny or not, then post to a “Top Digg Comedy” Blog.
I hope I’ve made my point at showing the potential value of these features. So I think you are halfway to building something incredible Yahoo - finish the job!
