Yahoo! Pipes Interactive Feed Aggregator/Manipulator

pipes.yahoo.com/pipes

By Jeff Hastings -- School Library Journal, 6/1/2007

As a young boy, I rarely played with my toys as they were intended. Instead, I found ways to use my chemistry set, electronics kit, and erector set together. If I could incorporate some Hot Wheels track and somehow get G.I. Joe in on the action, so much the better. Unbeknownst to me, I was developing critical 21st century skills—and Mom thought I was just trashing my room!

Mashups are hot right now—and not just on the dance floor. “Repurposing” information from multiple Internet sources to suit individual needs is cutting edge stuff, and Yahoo! Pipes, still in Beta, is at the forefront, putting powerful information remixing tools in the hands of average users.

Don’t be surprised if your first visit to Yahoo! Pipes leaves you a bit befuddled. I felt that way, too. But after creating a pipe myself, then tweaking it—and tweaking it some more—I can say it’s an interesting and highly addictive tool.

Yahoo! Pipes consists of information gathering and processing modules that you select and drag onto a grid and then connect, flowchart style. You select what goes into your pipe and reprocess it to get the results you want spewing out the other end. There are modules that fetch, count, filter, combine, and sort information from RSS feeds, as well as modules that interpret, extract, and import location data so that you can regionalize your pipe’s output. You can also plug in services like BabelFish and Flickr to translate or associate images with your pipe’s content.

My first pipe experiment was pretty basic. Summer’s finally here so I’m totally preoccupied with my annual fishing trip to Northwestern Ontario’s Lac Seul region. I decided to create a pipe that’d tantalize me with fishing related tidbits right up until the golden moment I make my first cast and commence telling lies. First, I used the fetch module to suck up RSS feeds from about 30 different Canadian and fishing-related news outlets and blogs. I attached that fetch module to a filter module and set it up to only accept news related to my favorite target fish species or specified fishing venues in the vicinity of my angling destination. The results were pretty good, but they were nothing I couldn’t have achieved with other news aggregation tools. Yahoo! Pipes let me do lots more. I combined that aggregated and filtered feed with three unfiltered regional searches targeting local fishing information and a weather feed for my fishing destination. The weather updates quickly piled up and started overwhelming the rest of the pipe results, so I used the truncate module to ensure that only the latest weather update made it through the pipe. I then used the sort module to put my results in descending order by date.

The result was a nice mix of targeted fishing tips and Lac Seul regional news and weather. Now my fishing buddies get my customized and republished fishing feed on their newsreaders, and I’ve added it as a widget to my Google start page.

Now that I’ve messed with Yahoo! Pipes, I’ll remember the tool when I really need it. You should visit, too, and see what you can mash up.