the Onda

I really loved this post on O'Reilly Radar from Marc Hedlund, especially when he says:

One of my favorite business model suggestions for entrepreneurs is, find an old UNIX command that hasn't yet been implemented on the web, and fix that. talk and finger became ICQ, LISTSERV became Yahoo! Groups, ls became (the original) Yahoo!, find and grep became Google, rn became Bloglines, pine became Gmail, mount is becoming S3, and bash is becoming Yahoo! Pipes.

It makes sense if you think about it: UNIX was after all the first network-native multi-user (social) operating system. All of those users back then in the 1970s were living William Gibson's future: present, just not widely distributed, so they developed patterns for work and play that most of us are still rediscovering today.

That said, I still really don't get Yahoo Pipes. When Yahoo launched this mashup application a few weeks ago, the entire blogosphere lit up like a Christmas tree with raves about how this was bringing the ability to program the web to the rest of the non-programming world. Just like OO and software components were meant to 20 years ago and just like Applescript and Automator were supposed to over the last few years.

I tried two Pipes. The first one (which took me the bulk of the 40 minutes I spent playing around) was meant to test a theory that Jon Udell told me about recently regarding common identity across various web services: Jon said that one way to tell who was who was to look for common usernames like fetching or supergeek57. So I tried to wire a Pipe that would take one of the recent tabblos RSS feeds, strip out the username, and do searches for same-author Flickr photos:

No dice though. Despite having a Fetch RSS component and a Flickr-specific component, I just could not wire the canned components in the right way. In Python this is a 7 line script but in Pipes, it's a whole lot of cool AJAX dragging and no satisfaction.

Then I figured I would do something simpler and take the Huffington Report's heinously monster RSS feed and filter out Chris Kelly (my favorite blogger from there):

This was much easier to do but I've got to admit that there have to be easier ways to get this done than by building a Pipe.

Unix worked where Yahoo Pipes doesn't because people wrote a large ecosystem of small programs and because the real pipe (|) was more loosely typed and flexible than the Yahoo Pipes inputs/outputs. The first problem could be solved with lots of programmers writing Pipes for regular folk but I have a hard time seeing that so long as it is possible for these same folks to whip off quick Perl scripts that do the same. And without the rich ecosystem of Pipes, I'm not sure the inter-connects will ever get flexible enough.

So while I agree with Marc on the overall insight, I think that Pipes is not the web's replacement for bash. I do think that replacement exists though, and its arrived in a really weird first incarnation: MySpace.com.

Sure it is the uber-daddy of social network, but to me to most compelling part of MySpace was the way that it allowed regular folks to copy and paste bits of HTML and Javascript into profile pages in an interactive way that UNIX folks from the 1970s would have been proud of. And by the look of some of these profile pages, it is unlikely these folks stitching random bits of execution together are particularly technical. Just particularly motivated.

So Marc is right— UNIX is getting re-invented on the web, mostly because the problem domain is the same and the social urge is still there. It's just not the geeks anymore which means that the form it takes is not always a clear and obvious mapping of the UNIX of old.