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12 Feb 2007
Yahoo! Pipes
One of the main events last week in the MicroContent world was the introduction by Yahoo! of Yahoo! Pipes. It surely is not a service for the fainthearted, it is really a geek service. But interesting nevertheless. It is bit hard to get to know the service.
Yahoo! Pipes works only with a single MicroContent Type: blog Items. The service allows the to mix and match these MicroContent Item by using the information in the structure of the Items. And this probably can become pretty complex. And the output of the service is always an RSS feed (or the corresponding web-page).
I started with a simple pipe: the aggregation of my three MicroContent feeds. You can find the corresponding RSS-feed here. While creating this piper I found several errors with my existing RSS 2.0 feeds. Th errors have been repaired now, although there remain problems with certain characters. Yahoo! Pipes only uses and republishes the description fields of Items. It turned out that I did not used those in my feed. What I did now was to put the first 200 characters of the content field in the description field. I have no idea what the correct way to go is. It seems that the description field only contains a summary. I also am unclear between the dc:date and pubDate fields, which I used for sorting the feed.
This is really a very simple pipe, it will get more interesting once the results of a yahoo query are used as input for fetching Items. It will be much more dynamic. I like this pipe, which uses the NYTimes as input to search Flickr. Also the pipe that searches for apartments near parks is interesting. These pipes show that Yahoo Pipes is not really limited to the blogs, but can do interesting things with locations, images and classifieds as well. It is just getting the right feeds and making the right queries.
You can browse the most popular pipes yourself if you want to have an impression of what is possible.