Yahoo Introduces “Pipes”
Posted Friday, February 9th, 2007 at 11:51 am by Tim (38 posts)
Named after (and following a bit of the function) of Unix “pipes,” Yahoo has introduced a graphic interface (http://pipes.yahoo.com) through which anyone can create new RSS feeds in a nearly limitless number of permutations. Creating your own pipe from scratch, while fairly straightforward, is not neccessarly for everyone: there is a certain amount of programming logic (if, then, for) knowledge of which will come in handy when developing a good, new pipe.
Fortunately, there is a pretty good list of pipes already created for you to copy or edit and save. You can also return the favor by publishing any interesting pipes you design back to the community.
The basic idea is that you can create a sort of “mashup” of different RSS feeds, optionally do something with that mashup, and end up creating your own, new RSS feed from the results. For example, one user created a pipe that grabs a feed from the NY Times and sends keywords off to a flickr search, returning pictures matching those keywords. Those pictures are then saved as a feed you can add to whatever feed reader you use (I currently highly recommend NetVibes). Another runs a keyword search across six popular news sites and blogs and returns a mashed up feed sorted by date from all of them. Drop that feed into your feed reader and you’re good to go: a constantly updating RSS feed from any source you want, on whatever keyword you picked when running the pipe you created.
The Yahoo pipes platform seems to be making quite a buzz in the geeky blogosphere. It’ll be interesting to see if it works it’s way out to less-geeky, yet still RSS-savvy population. After explaining the way it works to several co-workers, it became apparent that this is one of those things that is incredibly powerful, very neat-o, and a bit tricky to wrap your head around.
