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My first facebook app. I_WANT_ONE lets you tell all your friend what you want this holiday season. Go ahead, give it a try.. Also know what your friends want.

Have you heard about this one? I was aked by a friend to have a look at this new concept. Initially I could not understand, I couldn’t figure out how to make it work, what to implement, what it achieved. So as usual, I let it slip out of my mind and more simpler things kept my grey matter active… like watching tennis, cricket, and when I wanted to give the grey cells a little bit of breather I watched bollywood movies. This continued till yesterday, when suddenly some anomaly in the universe popped the Yahoo! pipes back into my mind. Since the work schedule was bit relaxed, I decided to unearth the mystery of these weird pipes. After all what followed through these pipes, certainly not crude oil or did it???

Well after some initial read up, it was safe to conclude that Yahoo! still did not have any say in OPEC. And then as I delved more into these pipes, I realized that this was a ingenious concept that I think has the potential to change, hmm well, create a new way of serving information to the user from data scattered all over the web. Normally as it stands today, a user can request information from a single website. He can set filters and narrow the scope of the data that he thinks contains the information he requires.

But here is what Yahoo! pipe promises. You can feed this application data from multiple sources dynamically from the web and channel this information through various pipes applying your custom rules and transform this information so that it maps with any entity and voila! You have something which I am sure has no business sense now, but in time will spark an idea which in a few years will be sold for an insanely huge amount.

Currently creating a pipe is kinda complex, as it uses meta-language and programming constructs that a layman may find hard to grasp. But with time I am sure this will get simpler. And it is from here on that I expect this framework to deliver.

There already is a pipe that takes the top songs list from iTunes and then gives the user links to the videos for these songs. You can check it out here. And this is a fairly simple pipe to implement and actually sounds like something that one may find useful, right??? So Yahoo! pipes has the capability to deliver, but it requires the ingenuity of the human grey matter to realize its full potential…

Looks like Web 2.0 is finally beginning to deliver. Also I must give it up for the guys at Yahoo! to actually come up with this cool technology. Microsoft too, not so long ago, announced what I think is the most exciting technology since Windows, MS Surface. It’s time for guys at Google to pull up their socks… looks like they are falling behind.

For more information

http://www.dashes.com/anil/2007/02/yahoo-pipes.html

http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2007/02/pipes_and_filte.html/

Useful videos to get you started

Madz signing in…

Got to hear a very interesting comment the other day.. It was “Programming is now a commodity”..

Of course it was not quoted by someone very knowledgeable about the topic and must have been the result of a CYA approach, but delving over it, it does start painting a picture and it may not turn out to be very pretty overall..

Agreed, programming is still the Holy Grail for all the quality products and services that you see out there. But the power today lies not in the quality of the number cruncher lying under the hood but rather in the quality of the data produced as a result. And the real killer deal today is the ability to string together multiple sources of data together (more or less in a loosely coupled manner) to generate new platforms for the sharing of information and services.

As a result, you see a killer application in FaceBook that allows you to share anything you want under the sun through widgets and Flickr that allows you to build up a prolific community based on images, image capture devices and image locations. Linking of relevant data sources was always around by means of makeshift workflow models adopted enterprise-wide. But with the emergence of a global community generating meaningful content on a daily basis, there was the natural need to take this out of an organizational perpective to a global one.

Enter Indigo (refer .NET 2.0) by Microsoft which is essentially a programming platform/model that drills into you that no binary code out there is an island anymore and every binary code out there is a potential service. Indigo allows you to build connected services on the fly and would automate to a large extent the ability to expose your application as a service thus allowing it to be consumable by anyone who might be able to link it with another source of relevant data to create that killer application that is now looming in the horizon.

Hence, while the laying the business rules into practice still essentially belong to the domain of the premium programmer, the eventual monetization in terms of scale and volume to a bigger audience is now becoming very much a commodity.

Madz signing off….