The Power of the Pipe

It’s been just one year since Yahoo introduced Yahoo Pipes, the most powerful, flexible, useful, and yet underutilized free utility available. Pipes’ techie-oriented interface, combined with the fact that many still don’t have a full understanding of feeds might explain its under-utilization. However, as we come to a better understanding of the “Power of the Feed,” Yahoo Pipes will become an indispensable tool.

So what is Pipes? Pipes is a data aggregator and manipulator. Why use Pipes? So you can take all the information you ever seek on the Internet, and format it together into an easy-to-read RSS feed (as well as JSON and KML – but that’s another blog post for another day). Come on – all the information on the Internet? You bet! Using Yahoo Pipes, you can import any already accessible content on the Internet, including RSS and other XML-based feeds, as well as any information that appears on a Web page.

How can a non-profit use Pipes?

Let’s say you are a national non-profit with several independent affiliates, and you’d like to keep your Web site current with affiliate updates. But all these affiliates have their own Web sites, and run them all in their own way – some use RSS, some don’t. They all format their pages differently. Going to every affiliate web site, finding the news page, copying and pasting again and again, and putting it into your own CMS would be quite a hassle.

Yahoo Pipes to the rescue.

You can create one aggregate feed from all your affiliate sources. One source doesn’t have RSS? Don’t worry – with a little bit of know-how, you can have Pipes “scrape” an affiliate’s news page in such a way that it reads only the URLs and titles of news items. You can filter items, and use Regular Expressions to manipulate things like the time, headline, and other data items to appear however you desire.

Once you’ve got your feed together, you can use any number of tools to integrate the feed onto your site. Your CMS may already have an RSS Feed Reader. Or you can use FeedBurner, Magpie, Spry, just to name a few. Or you can create your own.

I will warn you, it will take a bit of work upfront, both to get used to the Pipes interface and to make your custom feed. But the pay-off is well worth it. Your Web site will be constantly updated with the latest affiliate news, and you don’t have to do a thing!

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