Piping hot... (a DIY plumbers guide to Yahoo! pipes)

Link to: WackyB + Yahoo! Messenger & More... news feed (created with Yahoo! pipes)

In the words of Yahoo.... "Pipes is an interactive feed aggregator and manipulator. Using Pipes, you can create feeds that are more powerful, useful and relevant." Pipes is a relatively new site/service from Yahoo! that has almost made it's way in through the back door (apart from the '' stamp at the bottom right of the page you would probably be hard pushed to recognise it as a Yahoo! product at first). Those that really know about it (mostly programmers/technical) rave about it as the next web revolution. It wasn't the description given by Yahoo!, or the news hype that drew me into wanting to come back for a second look (and play) with Pipes, but simply the graphical user interface used to create the pipes.

When I first heard about pipes my initial response was 'big deal'!? after all I could do the same with news reader software on my own PC. Turns out that was a rather simplistic overview at what pipes was about, even now I'm still learning or rather discovering what pipes is capable of and where it fits. Pipes lets you select a number of data (news/RSS/blogs/etc) sources and manipulate them to produce a new data source as the end result; This could be as simple as taking a news feed and cutting the number of news items down or combining news feeds from many different sources and sorting them in correct date order. Pipes offers you the ability to perform much more complex operations with filtering and programming style tools as well as converting source feeds in to other formats; Yes I can do most of what pipes has to offer with software on my own PC but doing so online as a number of benefits not least the fact I can now share the results with others or use the live data on a website.