ambient

I started to play with Pipes a little this morning.

My first pipe simply takes the output of this blog, pipes it through BabelFish to translate it into Japanese, and output the result. The character encoding seems screwed up when you view the result and, of course, the quality of the translation is subjected to the mercies of BabelFish’s translation algorithms. However, I’m very impressed with the potential that this sort of ad-hoc content merging / transformation holds.

Some of the more interesting pipes on the homepage are a list of TechCrunch citations, the very innovative New York Times Through Flickr pipe, and another one that merges all of the Yahoo Blogs. The last example demonstrates a different approach to creating RSS reader subscriptions and is more akin to the RSS-reader-as-News-River use case.

Perhaps an overarching trend here is a new breed of services / tools that allow a crossover from simple (or powerful) customizations on popular tools to publishing those customizations in order to make them useful to more people than just one. That would be yet another example of what makes the internet so powerful in a long history of innovation swapping.

Steve Yegge’s excellent essay last month on building software platforms touched on this as well. GreaseMonkey, for Firefox, is a better extension mechanism for Firefox in many ways that Firefox’s own plugin system. He’s not the first person to show me that many of the ideas from UNIX are alive and well on the internet, but he is the first that I know of to view Firefox as being as much Emacs as it is a web browser.

The inevitable question will be how to monetize this service, but the nice thing about it being developed by Yahoo is that they 1) have the resources to develop the features for awhile without worrying about how to make money from it and 2) have been very good with their acquisitions (including del.icio.us and flickr) by not overhauling what makes them work so well in order to fit into some convoluted business model.

Besides, the potential to monetize this service, both for Yahoo and, if Yahoo is smart, for users / publishers (notice the ongoing convergence there) is huge. As search and findability become increasingly mobilized, contextual, and regionalized (and tied directly to local and offline conversions), the ability to fund a network infrastructure that creates even more conversion opportunities between services, the opportunity is staggering. And if Yahoo is really smart, they will figure out a way to make even more money by empowering their users to first make money with the services they provide.

Exciting times ahead.