What Can You Do With Yahoo Pipes?
By Rob Safuto on Feb 14, 2007 in RSS, Social Media, Tools | Tags: RSS , Yahoo , Yahoo-Pipes
So far I’ve found two excellent uses of the Yahoo Pipes service.
- Aggregate a group of feeds into a single feed. I did that here.
- Create a tool to search for a term across multiple sites. I did that here.
One of the coolest things about Yahoo Pipes is the fact that you can view and edit the details behind each pipe so you can learn how to create your own.
RSS inventor Dave Winer doesn’t seem too impressed. I can see where he’s coming from as a programmer with skills around RSS. People with those kinds of skills always have the option for building their own stuff. It’s people like me who know the data they’re looking for and don’t quite have the skills to program that stand to gain the most from this tool.
The open nature of the pipes platform, combined with the fact that you can’t yet run a pipe off an external website, means that the service can’t be used to any kind of strategic advantage. I think that Yahoo could make a pretty penny selling licenses to allow application developers to run pipes from their own web server.
[tags]Social Media, RSS, Yahoo, Yahoo Pipes[/tags]
