Yahoo Launches Pipes, an RSS Remixer
RSS feed remixing has been a
pet topic of mine for quite some time, so
tonight it was a pleasure to discover Yahoo's new Pipes service (hat-tip Thejesh). It's a beta service from Yahoo and the name, which pays tribute to Unix pipes, betrays that it's designed for geeks and early
adopters to experiment with. Pipes is described as "an interactive feed aggregator and
manipulator" and essentially it enables you to create remix feeds. It's a hosted service
"that lets you remix feeds and create new data mashups in a visual programming
environment."
You can either create a new pipe from scratch, using the nifty visual tool, or browse through existing pipes and select one that strikes your fancy. You can also 'clone' a pipe, and make your own adjustments. Then click on "Run this Pipe" to see the results. Some automatically deliver a set of results, for example this pipe that aggregates Yahoo blog feeds. Others you need to add additional data to get results - for example this "hot deal search" pipe [screenshots below].
The real power is in the filtering options. Opening up the editing environment reveals a lot of choices to manipulate the individual feeds [see final screenshot below].
The idea is to then subscribe to the remix feed in your favorite Feed Reader. This is a neat service from Yahoo and I'll be playing around with it more tonight! The UI seems a little geeky and kind of reminds me of Ning (not sure if that's a compliment or not, as Ning never took off). But I've long thought that RSS remix feeds are the future of RSS - and certainly one way to try and filter information overload. So this is a great move by Yahoo to release an RSS remix service to the early adopter crowd. Let us know what you think of it in the comments...
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Hi!
Yahoos Pipes "filtering options" pretty much mimics our Feedreader3's smartfeed generator (soon 1 year old). Quite all strings and field layouts are the same (screenshot).
I can get two ideas from here :
1 - This kind of functionality is also implemented in personal applications and you do not have to use service for this.
2 - It's cool to see big guys to copy you :).
"Our Pipes are clogged! We've called the plumbers!"
Growing pains, ouch.
Regardless, this sounds great! ...for splogers.
I've been following this sort of thing for a while now, and I think Yahoo Pipes is very cool. What I don't understand is why they stopped where they did?
What if you could apply that same sort of logic to ANY web content? RSS feeds, news sites, email, any sorts of web services! I saw this video the other day that seemed pretty interesting. I thought it was only a Firefox browser plug-in until I read their newest post, it looks like they're attempting to do exactly what I'm talking about!
With all these different companies attempting to do "the ultimate mashup maker" I think we're going to have a very interesting next couple of years.
William - maybe the point is that if you try to do everything, you actually achieve nothing.
There are other, specialized tools, which you can use to extract content from virtually any website - the two that come to mind would be dapper.net and openkapow.com - they're quite powerful at what they do. You can use the feeds they generate and remix them with Pipes - so you can build multi-layered mash-ups.
I agree