Yahoo! Pipes and The Web As Database
My number one interest has always been reuse of existing programs in new uses. This interest is based on my love of programming -- which, after all, is continual reuse of various snippets of patterns for doing things strung together with the connective tissue of the programming language. When I managed the development of the PINPaper (Personal Internet Newspaper) in 1995 the main premise was that there was a lot of news information available on the Internet but I was only interested in a certain focused set of topics. So, we developed special purpose programs to sift through all of this information to pick out only those articles that satisfied a keyword search for the topic.
Last week, Yahoo announced Yahoo Pipes, a general purpose system with a nice visual interface for programming such extractions and recombinations of information on the Web. Although I haven't built anything with this system yet, I believe it is a good contribution to the activity of reuse.
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