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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I like the Get-Remix-Deliver model, it sums things up very nicely. If you like Y!Pipes & Feed43 then I think you would also like openkapow.com. It is a more powerful RSS builder than Feed43 and it also allows you to build REST services from almost any webpage on the internet.
It has reg. expressions now, and JSON output.
Tried to post the image, here’s the link:
http://farm1.static.flickr.com/196/456997406_dc80131ad3_o.jpg