It takes effort to explain the significance of a new product when the immediate benefit to consumers may not be so obvious, and the awkwardly named “pipes†from Yahoo! is no exception. The product name is taken from the world of UNIX where a pipe is a conduit for the transfer of data between applications, while with the Yahoo product it is a conduit for data between web services. In a basic form Yahoo! Pipes allows you to take data from one or more sources and to bring it together, for example - to aggregate a group of feeds. But Yahoo! Pipes goes beyond what just pipes are and what pipes do though as the application provides functions (or as they are called in the app - modules) that will perform a variety of different actions. There are modules available to prompt the user for input (a variety of input types), different operators to count, loop, cut, count, sort and merge data along with a variety of string and date functions. Because of this already broad base of available functions, Yahoo! Pipes is more akin to a shell scripting environment for the web rather than just a simple conduit between applications. It works like a visual procedural programming language with the output of the process dropping out at the bottom, in the form of text output, RSS, SMS alerts of even JSON. You can use feeds, user input or other pipes as input. The beauty of the application is with its simplicity - a user can take any sources, user input requests or the above mentioned module and drag+drop them into place and then connect the pipes. Within minutes I had built an application (also known as a pipe, they should probably change the name as not everything can be a pipe) that would search for ‘Techcrunch’ in a variety of feeds, bring that data together, sort it and filter it for unique results. I saved the application and published it, from where I can now execute it at any time and receive the output in a variety of formats. I can take a copy of an existing pipe (application, argggh) and use it as a base template for my own pipe and I can browse an existing library of pipes. Pipes can take any feed as input, and combined with the already available list of functions proves to be very powerful - my mind is still buzzing thinking about all that can be done with Pipes. I think some of the terminology needs to be cleared up, there needs to be a better introduction on the main page - but besides that this product is fantastic. It was inevitable that such a product would be released, and it is very good for Yahoo! that they managed to be the first of the big web companies to release such a product. The fact that they include Google Base as a default source in Pipes shows that the web is much more about interoperability than the desktop ever was or ever will be. Yahoo official link http://pipes.yahoo.com/
Looks lovely..all those pipes are sexier that the real ones in bathroom Finally yahoo stuck gold? lol
I myself haven't looked into it in depth but what I observed at a glance was that it allows you to make 1 rss of multiples giving you ease of remembering 1 rss feed/and browsing it. that's just in my opinion could be totally wrong.
I've just been messing about with it and I think it's quite interesting. I made a copy of their example eBay search (browsing through the other pipes I think that most people are starting out this way) and just fiddled about with the input parameters to make a 'pipe' for searching eBay for 'Bass Guitars'. ...Mine doesn't work, but I think it's something that I'm doing wrong, something wrong with the price range I think... I think you could do a lot with a tool like this but it's going to take quite a bit of getting used to it. Learning how to use it could be hard work - one could ask why you'd put much effort into it when you already know PHP/Ajax/XHMTL? This question will be answered as soon as someone finds a way of making money from it This is my attempt: http://pipes.yahoo.com/search?q=bass+guitar
It would've been good if there was a way to integrate this into our website to display refined feeds using an API.
i tried using it but gosh its very complicating...i can't set it up even after 15 minutes of going thru it!
I have found that it helps to look at another pipe when making your own. Example...I wanted to create an RSS feed pipe that grouped together all different RSS feeds and then spit out a giant RSS feed with all the feeds together...so I looked at an existing pipe and mimicked it (cloned it)