The Challenge

Rambles and Riff Raff about all this and that

And then I got pipped

Published by Esteban Glas on June 11th, 2008 | This post lacks all category except for: Betas, Web 2.0

Here was I, ranting against Yahoo’s lack of innovation. Then I came across Yahoo Pipes. I had only looked at it very briefly and, most certainly, not deeply enough.

I’m sorry yahoo!

Pipe’s tag line describe what it does quite perfectly, I must say. “Rewire the web”. And that it does.

Its interface works quite well, it is pretty intuitive and very powerful. But I must admit that to go just a little bit beyond the basics you need some sort of programming knowledge. Although getting the pipes to connect is quite easy (you can drag the pipes out, and the available inputs get highlighted) there are some other functions that are quite advanced. Some of this are regular expressions, loops and that kind of stuff.

Some really complex stuff using a wide array of sources can be achieved through the tool.

Basically pipes allows you to input any type of data available on the web (Feeds, JSON, webpages), mesh it all up, combine it, filter it, order it. Then you get the option to output the results in a wide array of different formats: as a Badge, into My Yahoo, into google, as RSS, as JSON, as a PHP. You can also set up Phone and Email alerts for them.

Another nice feature is the ability to call pipes within pipes. This means a certain pipe can be inserted as a module within another pipe…

There are some caveats, though.

Some services are already starting to deny requests initiated by Yahoo Pipes. Most notably if you want to use Google’s blog search RSS output the result is a 403 server error (access denied).

An area for improvement is Cache handling. Having the option to set up a cache timing and other settings could alleviate the burden on the servers and make the overall service more stable. Easier to say than to do since I can imagine that caching everything would put a lot of stress into Yahoo’s infrastructure.

If you are wired into the net I strongly suggest you give pipes a try.

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