Yesterday, I was at the PipesCamp organized by one of the little startups we share our office with, hover.in. They had actually requested me to give a talk, but things were so hectic over the weekend that I had practically no time to prepare, so I had to excuse myself.
But I was able to make to the event itself, if only as part of the audience. And it was loads of fun. The day started off with Bosky, the CTO of hover.in introducing Yahoo Pipes, it's potential, and why it is a new paradigm worth watching. He then invited Prabhu, who then took the stage and showed us how you could do interesting stuff with Pipes and the iPhone. And then there was a panel on how Yahoo Pipes could be useful for the day-to-day work of a blogger, and they dragged me onstage, as they needed a developer's perspective too.
For a question regarding what we thought Yahoo Pipes' drawbacks, or why they aren't as popular as they can be, I said I think that's because it is very much a geek tool. Most of the bloggers are tech-savvy, but they couldn't possibly expected to create something with Pipes, as it still feels like a light-weight IDE to me. I think something truly user-friendly, like a drag-and drop interface, regardless of the format of the sources, would help the adoption better.
And then there was a nice lunch, and people were encouraged to break off into teams and hack up their pipes, which was quite a bit of fun. I was about to start on my own, but Moyeen seemed to be really keen on working on one too, but he didn't have his lappie along with him, so I offered mine. Then I took a book and dozed off, only to be woken up for the demos. There were quite a few nice demos, which you can see on the PipesCamp page. There was also this very nice talk about Mashups and Monetization by Narain of Equvia. It is always a nice to catch up with him. All in all, a very nice, well-put together event.