Yahoo Pipes is actually kinda fun, but not very useful

If you haven’t heard, that allows non-programmers to build mashups (web applications that combine data and/or functionality from more than one source) by dragging boxes and lines together in a (usually) intuitive visual interface. I played around with it for a while and for listing one’s XFire statistics, and browsing around the site I found a few neat mashups other people have created. Once you’ve created your project, users can embed it on web pages or in blogs — for example, a user could embed my application in their blog sidebar to have it show their xfire gameplay statistics.

A screenshot of the Pipes visual editor

The visual interface was neat. It wasn’t particularly powerful — if you want to do anything complicated you’re probably better off scripting it yourself, rather than relying on the awkward “loop” operation and lack of basic features like conditionals — but for quick XML data manipulation or use of Yahoo project APIs (mainly Flickr), it’s a great system. I think it’s particularly good for people with little or no programming experience, as they can quickly create simple web applications with very little work, and even export them as PHP.

It is a bit strange, though, that the learning curve seems to jump drastically after pushing the system just a bit. The above mentioned “loop” operation is extremely unintuitive, and has to be abused way too much (at one point I had to loop over a list with only one item, simply because I couldn’t do what I wanted any other way). Similarly, I had to use some really ugly regular expressions hacks to do string manipulation and number formatting. I know I can’t expect the visual interface to be as powerful as a traditional programming language, but even after a few minutes of use it really started to feel weak.

That said, it’s a very nice system, and I’ve been impressed with it overall. I hope new features are added to it in the future, especially new UI options like check boxes or drop-down menus. As it is now, I can’t see much real use for it.