I guess we all know the buzz on Yahoo Pipes. It’s a brand new service from Yahoo that basically offers you a visual interface for fetching, combining, programming and publishing various pieces of the Internet, most of all based on remote services, like RSS or SOAP.
What you can actually do with it? Well, you can fetch somebody’s photo stream from Flickr and then combine it with some news feeds, and voila, you have a pipe. There are some basic operators that you can apply on the content you fetch, and there are also some user inputs that you can assing and act on the result specifically. I haven’t tested the user inputs yet, but what I’ve done, it was to create a pipe-feed (sorry, the name sounds strange…) and try to see what I can do with it.
I took the feeds of some of the GTD bloggers I appreciate the most, combined them, and published under this link. For the lazy that doesn’t want to click away here’s a little screenshot of what it looks like, from a “visual” standpoint.
I must say that the visual development pattern of Yahoo Pipes is pretty powerful and reminds me a lot of Automator. But, as with Automator too, it needs some programming skills to actually produce something, as the list of published pipes on Yahoo already shows. There are a lot of “tests” and “copy of…” pipes on the stock there.
What you can do with this pipe? Well, you can subscribe to it, get results by email or phone, or get sent to you as JSON (Java Simple Object Notation). That will allow to our AJAX developers fellow out there to program the nuts out of it, by hyper-extending it, to, you know… space, the final frontier… (One note from the programmer-side of me: around a year ago I saw an AJAX tutorial written by Rasmus Lerdorf – the creator of the PHP language, among other things, and the wonder-boy at Yahoo in the last 2 years – where he strongly advised the use of JSON for encapsulating data. Now I understand why…)
Of course, you can clone that pipe and start your own development out of it. I’m really curious what can we start from here. Disclaimer: this is intended as a pure exercise and can change in time. Or at least I do hope it will change in time 
.
Happy piping .
Technorati Tags: gtd, yahoo pipes, mashups
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{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
This looks very promising! I am going to have to take a closer look, because I can already imagine some very useful applications
Thanks for investigating…
I feel like I’m only scratching the surface right now… But I’m sure there’s much more in there… BTW: I like what you’ve done at gtdindex.marvelz.com (and the sister site too
), keep up the good work!
There is an easier way to accomplish the same, without having to use so many ‘Unions’. Simply use one ‘Fetch’ module, fetching all feeds, and pass that through one ‘Filter’, filtering for ANY of the rules. Less building blocks, and easier to maintain.
Perfectly right, I discovered this myself yesterday when i had a little more time to play with it…