The buzz about Yahoo! Pipes is through the roof – as of writing number 6 on Technorati’s top searches list. This confirms what a lot of us here have been saying all along: people want to look at web content in a completely customized way and on the platform of their choice be it Netvibes (we're big fans), Windows Live, Newsgator or whatever. Yahoo! Pipes provides an assortment of interesting tools that allow people to manipulate of web content feeds to their liking, something I think is an increasingly clear a sign of things to come.
I’ve played around with Yahoo! Pipes a little over the last few days. One of the easy things you can do with it is to create a single RSS feed made up of multiple RSS feeds and filter the results based on keywords.
For those interested in receiving a single RSS feed with, say, news about a specific political candidate from multiple websites, Yahoo! Pipes makes this fairly easy to do. The alternative would be having to scour several RSS feeds looking for the nuggets you are interested in. I talked about an alternative method of doing this a few months ago, but Yahoo! Pipes makes this process a lot easier to manage.
Yahoo! Pipes has a lot of work to do in making the tool more user friendly and less buggy, but it’s a great start. In its current form it’s going to turn most users off of using it as you need to be pretty comfortable with basic programming logic to get started. It also lacks any sort of tutorial that makes things harder still, although it does provide a few usage examples.
Here’s an example of a feed I created using Yahoo! Pipes that pulls in news containing the keywords "Obama", "McCain", "Clinton", and "Giuliani" from Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, New York Times, USA Today, Los Angeles Times, Houston Chronicle, Reuters and Associated Press.
You can explore the actual Pipe I created to make that feed. If you've got some other interesting ideas on content filtering/customization or applications of how to use Yahoo! Pipes to customize web content feeds let us know in a comment!
| Trackback URL |
