John Musser, February 28th, 2007 Comments(2)

Just a quick post on some good recent links on widgets and Pipes. First off, with 11 widget APIs listed at ProgrammableWeb and thousands of widgets created to run on them, widgets are something you’ll be hearing more about here.

Tracking the DIY phenomenon Part 1 and Part 2: Dion Hinchcliffe gives a good run-down of how the proliferation of widgets, badges and gadgets are making the web a do-it-yourself platform.
SOA for the masses: Widgets, pipes and teqlets: ZDNet’s Dan Farber takes a thoughtful look at the impact of widgets and powerful new mashup tools. “Just as more user friendly writing and video editing tools, as well as increasing bandwidth, have given regular people more of a voice and levers to push, making the Web more programmable–harnessing and mashing up any kind of data without heavy duty coding–will be another quantum leap for mere mortals.”

Speaking of widgets, Jeremy Zawodny’s timely post on JavaScript Badges and Widgets Considered Harmful kicked-off a good, long thread of commentary.

In just the few weeks since its launch, users have created thousands of data mashups using Yahoo! Pipes. A couple of Pipes-related links:

Yahoo! Pipes and The Web As Database: Over at Read/Write Web, Yahoo! Pipes inspires Alex Iskold to conclude that tools like Pipes are helping make the web one giant query-able database.
5 cool ways to use Yahoo! Pipes: franticindustries’ post on interesting pipes garnered 1000+ diggs.