More on Missing Pipes

The following is a comment I left on a post at Jon Udell’s blog about “rewiring the web“.  It outlines some of the ideas I have mentioned here, and one of the commenters mentioned that Microsoft, of all places, actually had done something similar to what I suggested.

I love this wiring the web idea, but I’m getting concerned about where the wires themselves are stored.

What if your dopplr or tripit or yahoo pipes or whatever you are using goes away unexpectedly?  This could break a lot of stuff you have built.

It might take forever to restore things to a working state, particularly if you relied heavily on one service.

Here’s what I think might solve this problem:
You log in to yahoo pipes and design a filter that takes feed A and creates feed B.

Rather than the filter being stored at yahoo, the pipes create a small object that you can add to your website (or wherever) that performs that functionality.  All that is needed now is for feed A to continue to exist.

Now, yahoo pipes suddenly disappears, to be replaced by google hoses.  You still have that one piece of functionality you created with the pipes, which still works since you didn’t store it at yahoo.

This would give you time to switch to google hoses for new filters, while old filters continued to work (and might even be able to be imported into google hoses for future editing)

So the filters get stored with your data — after all, you spent time creating them, so they are sort of a type of meta-data, right?

I think this is something that should be seriously considered.  Pipelines (or wiring, or street networks, etc.  Choose your metaphor) are laid with permanence in mind.  I don’t think the metaphor should break just because we are talking about digital connections rather than physical ones.