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Yahoo Pipes is a way to mash up RSS feeds and Web pages into combined information, apply rules and filters, and publish it. When it launched Feb. 7, 2007, the Pipes API worked fine in principle. But as "Daniel" said from the audience at a San Francisco panel this week, Pipes wasn't ready to scale.

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What's the first thing you should do if you're thinking of developing software for cloud computing? At ZendCon, Zend Technologies user group yesterday, three members of a five member panel answered the same way: adopt Simple Cloud API, the open source cloud services interface.

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What's notable about the open source project announced yesterday, Simple API for cloud computing, are the names that are present, IBM, Microsoft and Rackspace, and the names that are not: Amazon, for one, is not a backer, and let's just stop right there.

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Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce.com, finally got a little revenge. He wasn't in the least spiteful. Rather, he was only guilty of repeating something his former boss, Larry Ellison, said about software-as-a-service and cloud computing. An audience of cloud cognoscenti at Structure 09 loved the performance.

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The OSGi Alliance just celebrated its 10th anniversary. Another vendor consortium congratulating itself? Not exactly. OSGi has done a lot to make Java less of a mountain to climb. It specifies simpler, independent modules of code that can be modified, even when the application is running. And therein lies new opportunity.

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When thinking about applications in the cloud, it's best to think of new applications, applications oriented toward Web operations, and applications that do things in a way that's contrary to what you're accustomed to. In other words, think about using Google Bigtable.

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Moving applications to the cloud is what the Cloud Connect conference is all about. But cloud services at this stage tend to be somewhat self-referential. They're about working with what's already available in the cloud. Look at Lasso2Go, for example, a service I didn't know I needed.

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I'm sure just about everything can happen in the cloud these days -- maybe even things I don't want to know about. But when we're starting to help companies perform API management in the cloud, which is what Mashery is doing, it's probably a pretty good sign.

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Just a heads up that the seventh Mashup Camp starts this coming Monday, November 17th, at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA. We've got room for 400 people in the building and are somewhere north of 375 registrations right now (see who's coming). Tim O'Reilly is keynoting and over $9,000 in prizes will be given out on-site to the best mashups.

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Last week, I published Part I and Part II of my recent interview with Rajen Sheth, aka the inventor of Google Apps. Throughout Part II, Sheth and I discussed the degree to which the pre-release version of Google's open source browser Chrome represented the sort of browser-side innovations that might take Web-based applications (such as those that are found in Google Apps) to the next level. Google can and does of course push modern day browsers to their limit with the coding it does on the server-side. But there's only so much that can be done on the server-side to take Web applications to the next level before the browser must reciprocate.

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Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff made a splash with his announcements of ties to Facebook and Amazon's computing cloud at his company's Dreamforce user group meeting this week. "None of these announcements will produce discrete revenue," points out Steven Ashley, the Robert W. Baird investment bank analyst who shared my table at lunch. Then again, they don't necessarily need to.

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Whereas most cloud computing czars at most cloud solution providers are usually very gung ho about the cloud and mashups, Brandon Watson, Microsoft's director of Microsoft's Cloud Services Ecosystem, offers a bit more of a sobering look at today's state of affairs when it comes to using a variety of disparate Internet-based services to composite or mashup some business application.

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With balloons floating as tethered "clouds" in front of the Moscone Center and clouds projected onto the beams of the keynote hall, attendees at Dreamforce in San Francisco probably got the picture that CEO Marc Benioff wanted to talk about cloud computing. Which he did yesterday for two-and-a-quarter hours straight.

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I've been playing around with a new FriendFeed feature that lets you copy all your FriendFeed posts to your Twitter account. I think I like it so far, although it's also possible that it will result in the complete destruction of the space/time continuum. Or, even worse, overwhelming Twitter with a lot of noise.

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Are you one of the more than 120 people on the who's coming list of people attending this Fall's Mashup Camp? If not, then why not? The mashup approach to software development -- the one whereby applications are built in hours instead of weeks, months or years by melding together functionality and data that's scattered across the Web, a network or both -- will likely make mashups the most important of all software ecosystems for everything from launching new Web-based startups to the development of custom enterprise applications.

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I spoke with Matthew Greeley, CEO of Brightidea.com, recently and came away impressed with its approach to delivering real value with Web 2.0 sizzle. It just released WebStorm 5.0, which uses social networking elements to capture information that companies can use to drive innovation.

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There's no question that mashups are hot right now. In fact, it's a market that Forrester Research's Oliver Young says could be worth nearly $700 million by 2013. Vendors in every sector are rushing to deliver these so-called "situational applications" to sophisticated business users everywhere in the hopes of improving collaboration and spiking productivity.

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One of our contacts in the PR world sent over some thoughts after reading our continuing discussion about why content management companies fail. His remarks might not be terribly surprising for those of you that live and breathe content management, but they warrant a re-visit.

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A few more mashups from Mashup Camp, including video interviews. This time a smaller player, Denodo, and some unlikely big dogs, Intel, and IBM.

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Thankfully, as the popular press tries to make anything that is a combination of two things a "mashup," the trend is actually now toward building enterprise-class services to create enterprise-class mashups. The litany of companies (new and old) we talked to at the recent Mashup Camp in Mountain View, Calif., was a respite from the Map + Something Else mentality of the early mashup days.

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I have to admit that, at first, I didn't get it. Last month, at Mashup Camp in Silicon Valley (the next camp will be in June in NYC), Serena debuted its Just @#$% It!! What are they saying? video.(The video also is embedded below.) The video (now up to 1.17M views) features office workers telling each other to "mash it" as though the word "mash" is a dirty word. Each occurrence of it (and there are many) is bleeped out. By the time the librarian-esque female star of the video has "@#$%-ed" it, the bun in her hair isn't so tightly wrapped, there's a bit more flesh showing below the neckline, and...

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Collaboration and community are two very big hills for vendors to climb these days. As the saying goes, many have tried and many have failed. Add Microsoft's SharePoint to the growing list of things you'll need to overcome and some might say you're spinning your wheels.

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One of the most exciting concepts demonstrated during ETech was a data visualization concept, a phenomenally attractive and useful way to find information so quickly and thoughtfully, it seems at once elegant, clever, and obvious. The company: Stamen, a design studio in San Francisco. The application: Like anything in the visual world, it's easier if you just see it, but it involves a series of sliders that make underlying data come to life as you stretch the boundaries of the information you're looking for.

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