Make way for the Pipes
February 21st, 2007
Last week, Yahoo announced a new service called Pipes, which is “a hosted service that lets you remix feeds and create new data mashups in a visual programming environment.” In the circles in which I operate, some said that this would be the biggest news of the year, despite the fact that most people who said this hadn’t actually used it yet. The pundits are giving lots of reasons why this is such an important milestone, and I have my own ideas, many of which were alluded to in my thesis. A few days ago, I even saw an article called Yahoo! Pipes and The Web As a Database - a phrase that I have used more than once in presentations.
By releasing this tool, Yahoo has effectively gone on record saying “if you want your content to be seen, you must make it available to people in a way that lets them use it however they want”. And Yahoo is one of the few companies that could make such a statement and be taken seriously. If some unknown web startup had released a similar mashup service (and apparently there have been a few), the bar would have been set much, much higher. Only if the product was perfect in every aspect would it have had the same kind of impact as Pipes. As it is right now, Pipes is lacking in a lot of ways, but the message that it sends is still clear.
Even my brand new Earthify script will be made trivial by the fact that Pipes will eventually support KML. However, after a few minutes playing with Pipes, I see several important modules that Yahoo would have to add to make the tool viable as a general mashup tool.
- HTML input module (which I think I read was on the way, but I can’t find the link). This would have to include an HTML Tidy cleaner.
- Regular Expression and XPath Modules
- iCal output
- media enclosures for mashing up podcasts
These modules would probably be in some kind of Advanced section, but they would greatly increase the power of Pipes.
It’s always sort of bittersweet when you champion an idea for a time, and then suddenly it breaks through and makes it mainstream. On one hand, that’s what you wanted, right? On the other hand, when you are fighting for a cause, it gives you direction. Now I have to completely reevaluate what I am doing with Switchboard, and see where it fits.
The Presentation
On Friday I gave a short presentation at Eyebeam describing the work that I have been doing over the past few months. I made a glorious keynote slideshow, packed with glorious transitions. Here’s an export of the presentation. Some of it won’t make sense because you don’t have the narration, but whatevz.
FeedBlast (previously OPMLove) Update
Former classmate and 1.61803399 fan Josh Cothran pointed me to the exact article that I wanted to read, but didn’t knew existed. The Cocktail Party Effect is “the ability to focus one’s listening attention on a single talker among a cacophony of conversations and background noise”. The paper looks at why we have this ability, and how we can utilize it in practical applications.
So the current official description of FeedBlast is:
Advances in filtering and delivery of syndicated web content have significantly increased the amount and of highly-relevant information that a person can access with minimal effort, and this trend will only continue. Technologies that aid in digesting information have not kept pace with the related delivery methods, leaving many people (such as the author) completely overwhelmed.
FeedBlast is a service that generates an audiovisual collage from items in a collection of RSS feeds known as an OPML file. The goal of the collage is to present as much information as possible in the least amount of time possible. It does this using a text summarizer to condense the text, a semantic analyzer to pull out important keywords and concepts, a text-to-speech generator and audio search engine to generate an audio track, video and image search engines to produce an accompanying video stream, as well as several editing techniques to make it as dense as possible while still remaining comprehensible. The result is a audio/visual clip that is something like an evening newscast, except that the stories overlap and you don’t quite catch everything. Watching a FeedBlast is not about comprehension, but about gaining a general knowledge of the information landscape so that you can then explore the areas of interest in more depth. It will be available to the public as a personalized podcast that the user can watch on their personal media player.
I am currently researching a phenomena colloquially called The Cocktail Party Effect, which is “the ability to focus one’s listening attention on a single talker among a cacophony of conversations and background noise”. But there is much more room for research into video editing techniques and visual cognition. The application itself will be written in Java using the Quicktime API.
Overheard In New York
In my ongoing quest to create a podcast, I have decided that I will try to write some scripts based on entries from one of my favorite websites, Overheard In New York. The original idea was to take the small chunks of dialog that are found on the site and turn them into longer skits. But after trying out this format with a few of the more entertaining entries, I realized that most of the humor of the site comes from *not* knowing the context of the statements. So I have gone back to the drawing board to evaluate whether this is such a good source for inspiration.
Dirt
Things are moving forward with the Dirt Party on at least 3 fronts. Dave and I will be preparing a proposal for Ars Electronica based on the original Dirt Party idea, but modified to use Bluetooth phones. During my presentation on Friday, after I talked about the party, Paul Amaitai (a great sound artist - check him out) recommended that I install it at a benefit that is being held at Eyebeam at some point in the near future. And finally, I have delusions that I am going to have time to put together a proposal for The Bigger Picture that uses some of the same ideas.
Related Stuff
- March 29th, 2007 - Apartment 2D
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