Yahoo! Pipes … a very interesting product for RSS junkies
Yahoo! just launched their Pipes product, and I’m pretty excited. It’s a beta (everything’s a beta nowadays) and still has some bugs, but I think it’s pretty interesting and useful. Essentially it allows you to work with information from lots of different sources (including search results, RSS feeds, Flickr, Yahoo! Local) to combine, link, reformat and manipulate them to create something that’s greater than the sum of the parts.
Here’s an example:
What does this do? First of all, it takes a user input, which it uses to filter all the output, and the default value is "Ikea".
Then it takes data from a bunch of input sources:
- A Google news results page’s RSS feed (for the search string "agency.com")
- A Yahoo search for the term "agency.com" restricted to the site adage.com
- A search at Technorati for the term "agency.com"
And it combines all of those into a single result set.
It then filters all the results from those sources, looking for the term the user input in the beginning, such as "Ikea".
The result? A listing of all Agency.com news from Google News, Adage.com and Technorati, with a user selected filter (like a client name or "Dave Eastman" for example).
This is a really simple example. It has lots of other features, like being able to pull locations out of articles and then search for the nearest plumber, or pulling author names from RSS feeds and looking up their photos on Flickr. It’s not a totally end-user product, but it is very easy to use considering its richness, and there’s lots of documentation, and lots of examples.
I’ll demo it at a London company meeting for Agency.com soon, but it’s worth a look now.
Oh, and you can run the search I created, here.
