Wednesday, February 14, 2007

A More Personalized Internet?

Continued from page 1

By Kate Greene

And it is the potential of Pipes that is exciting to many. "I think it's great," says Eric Lunt, chief technology officer at Feedburner, a Chicago-based company that manages feed publication information. As feeds become more integrated into Internet use, either from Internet Explorer 7 or applications such as Google Homepage, Lunt says, there will be an increased demand for tailoring feeds to individual needs. "It might take a couple of years for the impact to be felt," he says, "but I think it will be." Lunt adds that Pipes gives people the power of being able to take the huge amount of content that's on the Web, repurpose it, and change it in various ways--and "you don't have to jump into code to use this."

However, familiarity with software code could help. While programming experience is not necessary, understanding the logic of stringing modules together and the detailed module functions might be easier with some training. (How-to discussions are available on the Pipes site, and a helpful step-by-step tutorial can be found here.) But Yahoo, says Sadri, was really aiming Pipes at a level in between expert developer and programming novice. "At this early state, our focus has been to establish a tool that is great for developers and allows them to create innovative [applications]," says Sadri. "Ultimately, however, we expect that average Internet users will be the ultimate beneficiaries of the system, though they may not know--or even care--that Pipes is the enabling technology."

Some Internet experts question the transformative potential of Pipes. "Can you build useful systems with it?" asks Dan Weld, professor of computer science and engineering at the University of Washington, in Seattle. The programming interface is fairly easy to use, he says, but some of the functions are limited. For instance, one Pipes module functions as a filter that blocks selected information from getting through, but "the problem with the filters is [that] sometimes duplicates [such as multiple identical headlines] get through," Weld says. He adds that ranking results, in particular, is tricky to do without modifying the instructions with low-level code. "That's a reason to be a little skeptical about it," he says.

Sadri says that Yahoo will tweak Pipes over time, using feedback from developers. He hopes to expand the scope of the tool--for instance, by allowing users to build a Pipe within a Pipe--to enable more-complex applications. And since the project is in its experimental phase, he says, he and his team are still working on new modules with varying functions, and they're looking at ways to improve the scalability and usability of the Pipes site.