Results tagged “webservices”

One interesting pattern I've noticed popping up around my favorite new apps these days is that they follow what I'd call a "cloudtop" design. I thought I'd share my own notes on this pattern primarily so that people I'm talking to know what I'm prattling on about, but also in case anybody else finds the concept useful.

Great web apps like Dropbox (affiliate link) and Evernote aren't merely web services that happen to have APIs, or simple desktop apps; They live in a sort of new in-between state that seems to be delivering the promise of past hype like Microsoft's "Software Plus Services" slogan.

The key traits of a cloudtop app are:

• The app is designed with the assumption that you work and live across multiple devices, with broadly varying capabilities.
• While the app performs synchronization tasks, there's no "synching" action, its handles that function (often alongside version control and conflict resolution) automatically.
• Cloudtop apps are delivered as native code on nearly every supported platform, from desktop computers to smart phones, with an interface that scales appropriately.
• While the app may have a web interface, that's largely a convenience and is not usually the primary way in which you interact with the app.
• These apps often adopt a freemium model, with payment introduced in a very obvious way based on usage.
• Though they have native first-party clients, APIs allow for the app to become a platform for other developers, as with the Elements text editor or AirDropper uploads for Dropbox, or any of the apps listed in the Evernote Trunk directory.

In this pattern, iTunes isn't really a cloudtop app, despite having native clients on iPhone and on Windows and Mac, because it doesn't easily, let alone automatically do synchronization of libraries between those platforms. Netflix, despite starting as a disc delivery service, is rapidly evolving into what feels like a cloudtop platform — my library is available anywhere with great native apps on many devices, and it syncs my history and queue automatically.

Twitter may evolve into a cloudtop platform if its native clients win on every platform, but the fact that its primary use is far and away through its HTML web interface, it doesn't seem as if that's likely, and other aspects like a freemium business model or really robust synching (all my clients show a different subset of my DMs) don't seem to be a priority. Cloudtop apps seem to use completely proprietary APIs, and nobody seems overly troubled by the fact they have purpose-built interfaces.

One last, interesting note about this class of apps: They have social functions like sharing, but they're not really fundamentally social apps. I can share a Dropbox folder or Evernote notebook with you, but that's not the primary means of discovery. Word of mouth is what drives adoption, and there's little to no integration with networks like Facebook or Twitter, with the apps relying instead on good old-fashioned email for a lot of their social function. I'm not quite sure what that means, but there's some lesson there, especially given that these apps are very popular with a lot of mainstream, non-techie users.

Background: Yahoo's launched an interesting and innovative new service, Pipes, which lets users with a relatively low degree of technological expertise combine structured sources of web data such as feeds. In this way, it's possible for non-experts to create new web services for their own use or for public consumption. Pipes combines a remarkably sophisticated development environment with some core social features such as the ability to clone or share the web services you produce. The service is fairly approachable, but somewhat complex once you get just under the surface, and should be moderately successful while radically raising the bar for other tools in its category.

Some quick links if you're interested in this topic:

• Plagger: an open-source, installable feed routing system created by Tatsuhiko Miyagawa which performs much of the core functionality of Pipes and is customizable, but lacks the user interface and integrated development environment (IDE) which distinguish Pipes. (Disclaimer, for what it's worth: I work with Tatsuhiko. But Plagger's free and not a Six Apart product, so... shrug.)

• Ning: Perhaps the archetypal social application platform for the web. Headed by Gina Bianchini, Ning has thus far defined the feature set for end-user creation of web applications, though the focus has not been on creating web services.
• An introduction to Unix pipes. Not merely the inspiration for the name of pipes, the powerful idea of routing data through a series of loosely-connected applications is one of the core concepts that powers most lightweight automation and data processing by non-programmers.
• The Mario-inspired image you see here is available on a Threadless T-shirt. My wife has one and it is very cute.

So, what is Pipes?

Okay, with all the introduction out of the way -- what the heck is Pipes? Yahoo's overview page offers the following explanation:

Pipes is a free online service that lets you remix popular feed types and create data mashups using a visual editor. You can use Pipes to run your own web projects, or publish and share your own web services without ever having to write a line of code.

In practice, this means you can use Pipes to pick a few feeds or APIs to retrieve data from, set up rules for processing the data which is provided by those feeds, prompt for user input in your processing, and then output the processed results as another feed or object format for use in your own applications. In the simplest case, you can apply some straightforward rules to a feed and then subscribe to the end result.

Pipes also has a full web-based IDE. Even more amazingly, the IDE is incredibly rich and powerful, with the usual complement of editing tools you'd expect from a visual editor in a desktop application. I'd first seen a browser-based IDE for editing LiveJournal's S2 style templates, but even that impressive effort pales next to the Pipes IDE. I'll never learn all of the Pipes IDE's features, but I will always admire its gee-whizzery.

Passing the Pipe

Most importantly, and perhaps most key to the success or failure of Pipes, are the social functions that underpin the application. With Pipes, it's easy to make your own web services public, to clone web services that others have made, or to offer your own services for others to clone. That element of social sharing of code, first pioneered by platforms like Ning, makes the open source ethos much simpler to participate in. Instead of setting up complex version control systems and submitting patches to a central repository, application cloning works on a principal of infinite forking, taking the idea of embracing failure and building it into the platform. Code 'em all, and let blogs sort 'em out.

There's also another key accomodation of social functionality: Pipes is pretty. As I mentioned in the introduction, much of this type of functionality is technologically possible with tools like Plagger. But, much as I love Plagger, I just don't have the patience to install half of CPAN to get it running just so I can hand-code an application on top of it. And that's even though I think it's a cool idea -- imagine if I weren't already familiar with the concept of routing feeds around.

Pipes is attractive without being overly pretty; There are the requisite nods to Web 2.0 design (it's blue!), but overall the site is refreshingly straightforward. The IDE is, frankly, a little cluttered unless you're running on a gigantic monitor, but that's been true of IDEs since Visual Studio was still Visual C++.

The Bottom Line

Is Pipes going to be a success? In many ways it already is. It lets Yahoo unequivocally be first at something, and if you count the broader market of web-based application development tools, it lets Yahoo be best at something, too. It's innovative, exciting, and well-done. There are still rough edges and inexplicable nods to the Big Purple Monster. (Whose idea was it to have the Yahoo Messenger anime avatars next to developer names on the site?) But the web needs a way to rip, mix and burn feeds, and Yahoo has stepped up to provide an essential platform in a way that seems open and approachable.

So, take a look at the docs, browse some pipes, and let me know if any of you can get it hooked up to the firehose that is the Six Apart Update Stream (that's an endless Atom feed of blog posts, flowing into your pipes at 30 posts a second). Because routing all these streams to the right place is exactly what pipes are for.