A Dataflow Web?

Facebook released a plugin for Quartz Composer which lets you design interactive mobile apps.

That’s interesting. I don’t really know anything about Quartz. But I believe it’s like Max/MSP or PureData. A “dataflow” design system. Dataflow makes a lot of sense for plumbing together multiple services. And I’ve long believed it could / should be applied to orchestrating web-scale systems. For a while I hoped that Yahoo Pipes would go in this direction.

So will this be successful? On first glance, it looks like they’re trying to work at a very low level with the diagrams. In Max/MSP and PD, this is actually more fiddly than writing code. It’s the larger scale where diagrams shine. Still, it may well take off with a certain audience. Interesting move. I wonder if someone will try to copy it in Max or PD.