Yahoo Pipes
There’s a lot of buzz about Yahoo Pipes. Yahoo says that Pipes is an interactive feed aggregator and manipulator. Using Pipes, you can create feeds that are more powerful, useful and relevant.
Here is Yahoo’s definition of this service:
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.
They also posted this yesterday:
02.08.07: Downtime
As many of you noticed, we’ve had some downtime today as we try to cope with the unexpected heavy load. We’re working on adding more capacity and hope to be back to normal soon.
I’ve been trying to check out this service but can’t get in to do anything so this is only a heads up about it. I’ll keep trying and let you know more as the service becomes more stable.
If you are able to do anything in Pipes, post a comment so we can all learn about it.
I’ve created a few pipes and it is interesting tech. It is still quite technical though. You don’t have to be a programmer (I am) but you need to understand logic patterns (loops, forks, blocks etc.) and I doubt my mom will start using it anytime soon.
It is cool though. I created a pipe that finds a series of Flickr photos based on the title of each item in my blog’s feed.
It is also a really good example of what kind of UI can be built in a browser. Pretty advanced and with no Flash or XUL, just good old CSS, HTML and JavaScript.
Thanks, Paul. Can’t wait to get in there and try it. From what I read, I didn’t think it was going to be for the faint of heart, but that’s not us, is it?
Let’s all start creating Pipes. I believe there are some already created so you can see what it’s like.
There are many pipes already and you can click a Clone button which copies a pipe into your library and lets you edit it as you wish. It is a good way of getting started.
Excellent idea, Paul. That will help those who can’t quite see what to do! If I ever get into the system (I often have Yahoo problems) I think I’m going to like this.