Yahoo Pipes

Yahoo Pipes could be called a "mashup tool” - you can use it to combine, filter, edit etc. various sources on the net: Websites, RSS feeds, web services and such.Yahoo Pipes lets you take source web feeds, add some filtering rules, then produce a custom feed from the result.Yahoo Pipes are useful if you have multiple feeds of your own and you just want to combine them and publish a single feed. Yahoo pipes allows you to make your feed available for various feed readers, subscribe by phone and email. The thing which is lacking is the lack of support for monetization and marketing tools to support you leverage your aggregated feed.

There are several ways to combine multiple feeds into one and publish the aggregated feed. A very popular tool which allow you to aggregate feeds is : Yahoo Pipes.It will let you create your own user-content which can then be used by other people to create theirs. So, you take a data feed such as result of a web search or RSS feed of a blog or tagged photos on Flickr to create your own data feed.� These user-created content will be available through RSS or data feeds for other people to use.

This is slightly different from a traditional data mashup which takes two streams of XML (such as RSS feeds) and combines them to produce a result. Pipes are an example of a data mashup technology at work.It's safe to say that if you're not at least trying Yahoo! Pipes, you're falling behind. Pipes allows pretty much anyone with moderate developer skills to slice and dice RSS feeds in anyway you want. Developers can add data sources and interfaces to the data and output RSS all on the same screen. This is a sweet application.You could use Pipes for much bigger jobs too. You could combine multiple feeds into one, for example from various news sites and perhaps filter that so that it only contains posts that are about kittens.Pipes is a remarkable offering . It is the first GUI builder for the biggest database in the world, the Web iself.

Pipes comes out as more inventive and no less rigorous that its predecessors. It empowers developers to remix the building blocks of the web in a whole new way. And it does it with remarkable simplicity.Pipes is a powerful concept, but there need to be a fundamental change in the way RSS is presented before it will be useful. Right now it is limited to only current items in an RSS feed. There almost needs to be a FIFO (or UNIX pipe file) type of feed where data is continuously queued into it and it is up to the reader how much to pull out and use. This way the reader would have access to as much of the queued feed as it needs to present a minimum number of results.It worked, but it only used the data from the first page of search results, since that is all the RSS feed presented

.The point of pipes is that you can pull in say 10 different rss feeds and push out a new feed containing the entries from those feeds that match a search or whatever. It isn't really anything that couldn't be done already, but it does(theoretically at this point) offer an easy to use web based interface for putting it together, so it significantly lowers the bar.Pipes is a way of programming without really programming. Instead of typing in code, you drag and drop tools and filters around a visual interface, filling in the details as you go. Pipes is based on a social network paradigm, there are lots of prefabricated elements that you can grab from other users and change slightly to suit your needs.