I’m a heavy Yahoo Pipes user, and recently deployed Huginn to Heroku to see if I could use it to replace Pipes. My main motivation for this is ensuring continuity (should Y! decide to pull the plug on Pipes), but an almost equally important one is that managing Pipes has become nightmarish with the amount of individual pipes I’ve accumulated, currently more than 150.

With Huginn I see I can employ Scenarios to group agents together, which is already more than what Pipes offers. But duplicating just a couple of my Pipes’ functionality in Huginn has already produced six agents. Additionally, unlike Pipes, Scenarios can’t be nested (into Scenarios of Scenarios), so I fear that finding and managing individual agents, and perhaps even Scenarios, would eventually become as complicated as managing Pipes once I’d get in double- and triple-digit amounts.

So what I’d like to have in the UI is more means to classify and search for agents. My old-fashioned instinct makes me suggest a directory-like tree structure, but more modern and semantic solutions such as tagging could work just as well if not better. Being able to select an Agent Type could also be one way to narrow down the main agents list (/agents). That list also doesn’t seem to have a search function. The popup list for selecting agents in the Scenario editor does have a search and it seems to work nicely, with real-time results and all, although I’ve not yet created hundreds of agents to see how well it scales.

(In my case, another natural way to reduce the clutter would be having a true singular RSS feed filtering agent (fetch a feed, filter the results, emit the filtered feed), which is my main use-case for Pipes. Currently I’m using an RSS Agent to fetch the feed, a Trigger Agent to filter the results and a Data Output Agent to output the filtered feed, resulting in three separate agents for each of my Pipes. But this is a separate ”Agent Suggestions” issue from the one I’m reporting here. And of course there might already exist a smarter way to do this which I’m just not aware of.)