First, an apology: like Seth Godin before me, I am learning the seductive power of continued riffing rather than taking the time to flesh out a new concept. So while bigger better ideas grow obsolete in unfinished txt files on my desktop, here’s more on Widgets and the larger phenomenon of the disintegrating Internet.
If you’re looking for quality content, skip this post.
Yahoo! Pipes. Wow. This is a permutation of the make-any-RSS-feed-a-Widget concept. Instead, it’s concatenate-any-series-of-feeds-or-APIs-into-a-new-app. Frankenstein 2.0. Author ownership and URLs are becoming a thing of the past: Web content can exist in parallel, at unrelated domains.
Jeremy Zawodny lists a lot of other hot shots talking on this topic. I think Niall Kennedy gives the best quickie summary of Pipes and the implications, and Tim O’Reilly gives a great historical overview. Let’s see what horrors we can craft from the graves of other web apps. I enjoyed this line from Anil Dash on Tim’s blog:
“One man’s splog generation tool is another man’s pipe output.”
Speaking of splogs, here’s more from my continuing obsession with Widgets: In response to Justin’s “who cares?” comment on my previous post: Newsweek cares!
Widgets do not, however, seem to be creating many new jobs (thanks Scott!). Probably because some companies don’t realize how much Widgets could expand their user base – why limit yourself to an IM-based control panel when you could use Widgets as a proxy?
Finally, there’s another insta-Widget player on the block: webwag has launched another “Widgets on Demand” product.
That’s it for now. I’m midstream on a Drupal upgrade (sorry if your feed is effed). I’m hoping to use Drupal’s CCK module to create a new “tidbits” content type to allow me to throw out these little notes in a less obtrusive manner. Wish me luck.
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