Yahoo has recently launched the new product called
Pipes. The product name is taken from the world of UNIX where a pipe is for the transfer of data between applications. But Yahoo! Pipes goes beyond what just pipes are and what pipes do though as the application provides functions (or as they are called in the app - modules) that will perform a variety of different actions. As any product from major brands gets intial hype so did the Pipes and there servers went down for sometime just 8 hours after the launch. I was playing around with Yahoo Pipes over weekend, while there was lot of scope for improvement in terms of usability as a tester I just wanted to try out few things. I started creating a pipe which has two fetch modules both the fetch modules were given the same url to extract (
http://feeds.feedburner.com/softwaretesting) the output of these pipes was given to an Union operator which supposedly Unions the output of the two fetch modules. In general the Union operator is expected to combine the output of the two modules and remove the duplicate.
So I did expect the same but the output was that each article on by blog was repeated twice in the output. This behavior of Union operator while deviates from the general definition, also does not make much sense in Pipes use case. You can try this pipe
here. Though the RSS readers may detect these duplicates should'nt Yahoo pipes be handling it.
Hope that Yahoo takes a note of this bug and fixes it soon.
Carol Bartz is named as new Yahoo CEO. Carol is ex-CEO of Autodesk. She was with autodesk for 14 years. AutoDesk is a traditional software company building CAD related software and selling it to customers. Yahoo is free online web business with ads as revenue model. So, both the businesses are not similar. It interesting to see how Carol handles this.
