Teqlo Turns a Pipe into an Application
Posted on February 16, 2007
Filed Under Innovation, web 2.0 |
Rod posted on the Teqlo blog about how he built a Yahoo! Pipe widget that fed a Teqlo application. This is a great case study for how loose coupling of services and focus on data flow rather than programmatic flow can result in quick innovation with low risk.
We actually saw the precursor to Pipes about a month ago and didn’t even think anything of it until it came out last week. As would be expected, a lot of people said 1) jeez, what does that Pipes thing mean for you guys, or 2) wow, this mashup thing is really growing up! It wasn’t enough for us to simply use that standard line about how “well those guys are really complimentary to what we are doing, they’re not competitive at all.” In some cases it may be adequate to build a Pipe instead of putting together a Teqlo application, and the fact is that we don’t have all the feed manipulation pieces they do so there will be times that we build a Pipe as well.
I asked Rod and Andy (one of our Top Gun engineers) to take a look at it and see if we could either submit an input to a Pipe or take an output for our own stuff. Imagine my surprise when not even 24 hours later they showed me a rough working example. My next question to them was “great, but can you give me a use case in which someone would want to do this and we could make it easy?”. I got that on Tuesday. Never before have I seen an engineering effort around integration go so quickly and smoothly, and while I put a fair amount of credit to the fact that we have seriously good engineers I also can’t ignore that from a development methodology/ideology, loose coupling is really really fast and reliable. I can only imagine the catalogs of applications that enterprise IT has on backlog and how a platform and approach like we have would dramatically improve the situation.
We’ll get this rolled into the production system ASAP, but be patient with us because we have a bunch of other priorities ahead that we really have to get done.
Teqlo Turns a Pipe into an Application | Teqlo: To the end user, the Teqlo application looks simple, and was easy to build. It includes two widgets. The first is a Form widget which is used to call the Yahoo! Pipe and pass it search criteria. The Form widget gets the REST response back from the Pipe, and converts the response into Teqlo’s microformats. In this case, traffic information has been converted into the Location Microformat.
Technorati Tags: Teqlo, Yahoo! Pipes
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My name is Jeff Nolan and I write Venture Chronicles. These are my thoughts on technology, innovation, management, public policy and pretty much anything else that I find interesting.
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