Playing with Pipes
Friday, March 06, 2009 by Shreyas
When I heard about Yahoo Pipes, that too only recently I didn't give much attention to that. In fact I was wondering how could Yahoo! come up with anything interesting. The last time Yahoo attracted me was during the early days of email. But then I saw about pipes here and there in various blogs and only yesterday I gave some serious attention to it.
If I explain what Pipes is in my own words, I'm sure it would underplay the full potential and features of Pipes. Hence quoting from Wikipedia "Yahoo! Pipes is a web application from Yahoo! that provides a graphical user interface for building data mashups that aggregate web feeds, web pages, and other services, creating Web-based apps from various sources, and publishing those apps. The site works by letting users "pipe" information from different sources and then set up rules for how that content should be modified (e.g. filtering). A typical example is New York Times through Flickr, a pipe which takes The New York Times RSS feed and adds a photo from Flickr based on the keywords of each item."
I first created my own RSS feed of all my online activities at one place. Just add this link to your Google Reader subscriptions and you'll get all my twitter updates, flickr updates, blog updates, Google shared items in your reader directly. After completing this, my friend was asking me how I did this and wanted an aggregated RSS feed for him as well. So I made a customized aggregator which could be used by anyone to create a master RSS feed of their online activities themselves.
It's available at http://pipes.yahoo.com/shreyas/masterfeed. You can go there, give your usernames for various social sites and the URL of your blog and click Run Pipe button. After that, just click 'Get RSS' button to get your own master feed. In fact you might say I can do this through FriendFeed itself. But you can't get contents directly through FF, only the links. And you need to sign up for FF. Anyway the point is not to prove the superiority of FF or the masterfeed. It's just to show a sample of what can be done with Pipes. This example just scratches the surface of Yahoo! pipes. You can build some amazing web applications using Pipes. Just go ahead and check it out.
If I explain what Pipes is in my own words, I'm sure it would underplay the full potential and features of Pipes. Hence quoting from Wikipedia "Yahoo! Pipes is a web application from Yahoo! that provides a graphical user interface for building data mashups that aggregate web feeds, web pages, and other services, creating Web-based apps from various sources, and publishing those apps. The site works by letting users "pipe" information from different sources and then set up rules for how that content should be modified (e.g. filtering). A typical example is New York Times through Flickr, a pipe which takes The New York Times RSS feed and adds a photo from Flickr based on the keywords of each item."
I first created my own RSS feed of all my online activities at one place. Just add this link to your Google Reader subscriptions and you'll get all my twitter updates, flickr updates, blog updates, Google shared items in your reader directly. After completing this, my friend was asking me how I did this and wanted an aggregated RSS feed for him as well. So I made a customized aggregator which could be used by anyone to create a master RSS feed of their online activities themselves.
It's available at http://pipes.yahoo.com/shreyas/masterfeed. You can go there, give your usernames for various social sites and the URL of your blog and click Run Pipe button. After that, just click 'Get RSS' button to get your own master feed. In fact you might say I can do this through FriendFeed itself. But you can't get contents directly through FF, only the links. And you need to sign up for FF. Anyway the point is not to prove the superiority of FF or the masterfeed. It's just to show a sample of what can be done with Pipes. This example just scratches the surface of Yahoo! pipes. You can build some amazing web applications using Pipes. Just go ahead and check it out.
Posted in:
Pipes,
PonderWrite
|
|
|
