Yahoo Pipes lets you “rewire the web”
Don Day February 19th, 2008
Have you seen Yahoo Pipes yet? The service allows you to take any data source, run just about any processing you could conceive, and reoutput the data stream in a variety of formats. For instance: I wanted to put a module with the items I post to Lost Remote on my Idaho Radio News blog. I took the Lost Remote RSS feed and pulled it into Pipes. I set a filter to only allow items with my name in the creator field - then hooked it to the output. I then ran the resulting RSS feed through Feed Digest and plopped the JavaScript down on the radio blog sidebar. This is a very simple example - the Pipes directory has dozens more.
4 Comments Add your own
1. Anon | February 20th, 2008 at 9:09 am
I tried to use it when it came out, and boy is it confusing and difficult to use. I won’t waste my time trying it again.
2. Mike | February 20th, 2008 at 11:05 am
Same story here. It looks like it can be so useful and valuable but I was totally confused then and now. It sounds like it’s dumbed down auto-programming for real programmers, but it’s still way too confusing and not user friendly for the average person (and even those with moderate IT experience like myself). If I had some good ideas to make something out of Pipes for my station I’d feel comfortable relying on Pipes but I’d pay a techie teenager twenty bucks to create what I want for me. It’ll take him 5 minutes but save me 8 hours of learning curve.
3. oakling | February 20th, 2008 at 1:53 pm
Aw! I was proud of Yahoo for coming up with something innovative like Google does, before I read the comments here - but coming up with new things and making it impossible to get through the ad clutter or over the learning curve is so very Yahoo.
4. Tripp Fenderson | February 21st, 2008 at 4:19 am
@anon, mike
Seriously? I’ve found Pipes to be one of the most simple and elegant tools the Yahoo! devs have released to date. It makes data mashups so efficient (this coming from a non-programmer).
Pipe in the data, do a bit of plumbing to format it, and pipe it back out to the customer.
I’m happy. My site members are happy.
Brilliant.
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