Did you know that the Internet is a series of tubes? Senator Stevens thinks so. It’s how the data moves around. Though tubes. Seriously.

Yahoo is building pipes. The pipes gather and filter data. Through pipes. Seriously. Sound familiar?

Yahoo’s pipes are a bit different from tubes though. First, it’s real. Second, smart people made it (as opposed to Mr. Tubes: Senator Stevens). The idea is that there are loads of data feeds (RSS feeds) out there carrying lots of information. The “lots of information” thing is the problem — there is too much information that we need to sort through and put together in meaningful ways.

Pipes is interesting in another way as well: it has an amazing interface. Imagine a data-driven Visio. You drag a data block in, set some parameters, link it to a filter block, and before you know it you’ve tied the iTunes latest releases of your favorite band to the corresponding YouTube videos and delivered the list to your favorite news reader.

The interface is slick, but it’s definitely technical and not for the un-savvy computer user. No one has yet to find a way to make RSS feeds more accessible, so it would be hard to expect a web application that organizes that data to be simplistic.

I wonder how Yahoo’s pipes will work when Senator Stevens’ Tubes get clogged. Maybe Google will release a tubes cleaning website. I think Drainle would be a catchy name, don’t you?

Let’s talk about AJAX. Not the detergent, although it does smell good. AJAX (in the Internet world) is a technology that allows a web browser to send and receive information to the web server without making the page you’re looking at refresh. That’s really all it is. I hear you saying “But what in the world does that mean?”

The idea is that if the page you’re viewing doesn’t refresh, and completely redraw itself a couple things can be accomplished:

1. Less information is transferred from the server. Browsers do a good job of caching things like images so that they don’t have to be downloaded again, but for every image on the page, the browser still has to ask the server if it has a newer copy. That’s a lot of talking back and forth, and it takes time.
2. The interface can be more responsive. If you’re viewing a long list of items, and you’re looking at the first page, when you click the next button your browser only has to load the next set of data — not all of the formatting, and images and what-not. Clicking on something doesn’t require everything to be reloaded again.
3. Money can be saved. (This is the part you business owners will like) Because less information is transferred overall, there will be lower bandwidth costs.

The concept behind AJAX has been around for a very long time. Swapping the processing of data from the server to the client and back again has been happening in cycles since the inception of the mainframe. AJAX in the form it is today has also been around quite some time. Around 1998 I built an application that used very similar ideas to get around having the page refresh, but in the past couple of years there has been a heavy focus by the web programming community to build code that does it in a very clean and efficient way.

As time passes AJAX will mature even further, and may become the core method in the way that browsers work, rather than simply one way of creating web sites.