Yahoo Pipes: Interactive feed mash-ups

Yahoo Pipes: Rewire the web lets you…

remix feeds and create new data mashups in a visual programming environment. The name of the service pays tribute to Unix pipes, which let programmers do astonishingly clever things by making it easy to chain simple utilities together on the command line.

This is really neat. With too many RSS feeds in your reader client of choice, it can quickly become quite a pain to even scan the whole lot. (Personally, I’m not a big fan of feeds anyway, but that’s a whole different story.) With Pipes, you can build pretty complex filters to look for very specific information in an automated way.

To get a better idea of how it works, you can browse other users’ pipes. Take DanielRaffle’s New York Times thru Flickr pipe for example:

This Pipe takes the New York Times homepage, passes it thru Content Analysis and uses the keywords to find Photos at Flickr.

So far, there’s mostly experimental stuff online there. But if you think about the potential uses, it’s actually quite mind-blowing. Just think about combining upcoming.org, Flickr and the usual suspect tech sites. Or Google News & Flickr. Hmm…. Gotta check it out in detail asap.

(via netzpolitik.org)

Update: Looks like Yahoo really hit a nerve with Pipes. For Tim O’Reilly it’s…

[…] a milestone in the history of the internet. It’s a service that generalizes the idea of the mashup, providing a drag and drop editor that allows you to connect internet data sources, process them, and redirect the output. […] While it’s still a bit rough around the edges, it has enormous promise in turning the web into a programmable environment for everyone. Before I get into the details of what it is and how it works, I want to give a little background on why I’m so excited. This is something I’ve been waiting nearly ten years for.

(via)

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