02.14.07
Yahoo Pipes: Not for Mortal Users?
Pipes is a new beta app from Yahoo that has been getting high praise among the digerati. It takes advantage of the RSS machine readable format and allows people to remix that data in a graphical interface – no coding is needed.
Stan Schroeder on his blog has a list of 5 cool things that you can do with Yahoo Pipes, including:
Planning a trip? It takes research and time. Or maybe you can do a single pipe which will give you all the answers you need in a second? Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you: the travel fanatic. Seemingly most complex of all the pipes here, it’s actually quite simple to make. It combines Flickr images, Yahoo Answers, and Yahoo News related to the location. (Various other feeds could be added, but I chose only these three for simplicity’s sake.) This results in a very comprehensive feed with a lot of information on the place you’re planning to visit.
How useful is it? Pretty damn useful, I would say. With a bit of tweaking this single feed replaces what would previously be an entire service.
While that sound promising – getting contextual information about a place that exists throughout the web – trying to change the default ‘London’ to anything else doesn’t seem to work. And building a pipe from scratch, despite involving ‘no code’, is still slightly confusing. For example, something as simple as providing a unified feed for several of my blogs seems overly complex and still doesn’t work as I expected it to (I can’t figure out how to have the individual posts appear in the order in which they were posted – right now it seems to grab all articles from one site and then another). And, as Stan mentions, the interface is buggy and lacks some certain key features.
So would you ever use something like Yahoo Pipes? Or is anything beyond an aggregator for RSS feeds overkill?