Yahoo Pipes

I’ve now started looking at Yahoo Pipes and must admit the potential is kind of fun. For those who don’t know Yahoo Pipes allows you to bring different RSS feeds (aka News Feeds, XML feeds and all manner of things:) together and apply them to things like Maps etc..

Why would anyone want to do this? Apart from the tehnological buzz the joining of these feeds can create some interesting effects. For example quite a few feeds take Flickr pictures and then locate them on various maps. This can be useful for seeing where people are coming from for events etc.. Here is a example of it action.

One of the best things about Yahoo Pipes though is that is relatively straight forward to get going. The BBC web news section on this blog uses a BBC RSS technology feed and runs it through a Yahoo Pipe and filters the results to various keywords.

Yahoo Pipes (and other similar applications like Google Mash-ups) have a lot potential. They are technical tools but do not require massive indepth understanding of computing technology; however, a working understanding of the web is really useful.