Yahoo!’s Pipe Dream
Yahoo! Inc. launched a new service called Pipes today, though there’s a good chance you saw what I and many others saw when you tried to check it out… a note from Yahoo! saying the Pipes were clogged and a plumber is on the way. Guess there was a flood of people looking to try out Yahoo!’s Pipes.
What the heck are they, anyway? From the main page: “Pipes is an interactive feed aggregator and manipulator. Using Pipes, you can create feeds that are more powerful, useful and relevant.” Pipes is also a challenge to noun/verb agreement, but then, so is English Premier League football. The name Pipes is a hat tip to Unix Pipes, which allows programmers to get creative by combining commands. Here’s a quick look at some of the things you can do with Yahoo! Pipes…
You run the French newspaper Le Monde through Babelfish into English.
You can search apartment listings from multiple sources and filter for distance from a particular address.
You can combine feeds of all your favorite comic strips into one feed.
You can create a pipe that searches eBay for 1965 Ford Mustangs that within 300 miles that selling for less than $500.
This only scratches the surface; the Pipes creation tool is simple and clean to use, and like most programming, the way to figure it out is to get in there and try it. You drag and drop boxes, label a few inputs and define a couple parameters and hook up the pipes and give it a try. If you like what you’ve created, you can save it to your own collection of Pipes, and even convert the output to an RSS feed that you can view in your favorite RSS reader.
If you’ve created something that other people can use, you can publish it, and then anyone can use it. More importantly, there is a rapidly growing library of Pipes in the Yahoo! Pipes library as people play with the tool and create useful templates. You can go grab one someone else made and put in your own, and, all hail open source, kind of, you can view the structure of the pipe and tweak it to make it your own.
Check it out.
Permalink | Trackback | del.icio.us Digg Reddit
Comments:
Leave a comment
So many thoughts ran through my head when I took a look at this:
1. I could get lost in this thing. Many hours lost to play…
2. I wonder when Google will come out with their version of this? What would they call it? Wouldn’t it be nice if they collaborated with Yahoo on this?
3. Might this make a few more people interested in programming or at least technical things, or is it just that same audience playing and using these tools?
4. Haven’t played with enough yet, but it’d be cool if I could build some custom Pipes and then use it on some other website. I already know that I can build Pipes to ouput RSS, which I can re-use anywhere!
5. What’s the business model here Yahoo? I applaud you if you’re doing it b/c technology for technology’s sake is a great thing.
[…] Mr. Alex over at Geekfoolery writes today about Yahoo Pipes, a new service from Yahoo!, Inc. From the explanation over at the Pipes homepage, "Pipes is a hosted service that lets you remix feeds and create new data mashups in a visual programming environment. The name of the service pays tribute to Unix pipes, which let programmers do astonishingly clever things by making it easy to chain simple utilities together on the command line." […]
Dave…
Interesting topic… I’m working in this industry myself and I don’t agree about this in 100%, but I added your page to my bookmarks and hope to see more interesting articles in the future…