Pipes allows real users to mix and mash information.

Byline: David Tebbutt

Pipes allows real users to mix and mash information

David Tebbutt

Yahoo has done the world a favour by introducing a hosted "interactive feed aggregator and manipulator", called Pipes. While the name will go down well with propellerheads, it's a dreadful choice for the target audience. The service majors on the ordinary, not very techie user.

From a visual editor, users can drag and drop RSS and Atom feeds (others are planned), user inputs and various operations straight into a working area and, by wiring them together, create a new output as an RSS feed. It's a "data mashup" or "feed remixer".

All the clever bits are constructed from modules containing text boxes and drop-down menus, minimising the chance of failure. At the moment, there are 25 functional modules, including Flickr (search), Google base (search), Sort, BabelFish (translate), Union (merge feeds), Unique (de-dupe), Yahoo Local (classified listings) and Yahoo Search.

Here's an example of Pipes in action: Craig Cmehil, a web developer and evangelist for the SAP Developer Network (SDN), wanted to pick up external blogs containing specific tags but only if the blogger was a member of SDN. He used Pipes to take three feeds from the Technorati blog tracker where the tags included blogger and either sdn, bpx or sap. These were filtered to eliminate any who weren't genuine SDN bloggers. The posts in the resulting aggregated feed were then de-duped and sorted by title. The results can be viewed at Cmehil's hosted Pipe or the feed picked up in RSS, RDF, Atom and JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) formats.