Yahoo! Pipes: Get-Remix-Deliver model

Yahoo! Pipes is an RSS mashup application from Yahoo. It allows you to merge, sort, filter and combine RSS feeds. Since it is primarily a remix/mashup application, I’ve tried to list its features in my Get-Mix-Deliver model:

It’s easy to get excited about Pipes. I like working with it, because the UI paradigm (flowchart-based) matches the way engineers think. I’ve been testing it out a bit and while it is a very slick version 1.0, there are a number of features missing, in my opinion, some of which are crucial:

• RSS input only: you can only use RSS feeds as input. There is not a way to add other types of input, nor something like Feed43 to parse a webpage and convert it into RSS.
• More RSS Sources: specifically for search results on e.g. IMDB (’official data’), Technorati (’aggregated user data’), …
• No regular expressions: you can’t really manipulate the data in title or description fields. If I start from IMDB’s ‘born on this day’ feed, all titles are like “Matt Groening (53)”. What if I want to lose the age, so I can do a search on Flickr with only the name?
• RSS output only: it would be easy to add Javascript visualisation, or widget support. Oh, wait, a link with Yahoo Maps, that would be neat!
• Modular approach: imagine the possibility to add custom made source modules, operator modules … That would make Yahoo Pipes a versatile toolbox. But maybe the Brickhouse team under Caterina Fake might already be working on that.

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