Toy of the Day: Yahoo Pipes
Feb. 8th, 2007 11:40 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jducoeurSo the new device making the rounds of the blogs today is Yahoo Pipes.
The basic idea is that it's a general mashup tool for RSS feeds. You define "pipes" that are feeds plus a variety of operators, allowing you to combine and edit feeds at will using a graphical editor. At the end, you wind up with a single combined feed that better reflects what you're looking for.
It's really quite cute -- you define pipes by dragging these boxes around and connecting them as desired. It's aiming at a somewhat awkward middle tech level: not quite as all-powerful as the true hacker might want, and not yet easy enough for the ordinary user. Still, it may well be appropriate for someone like myself, who knows enough to be able to use it, wants more-customized feeds easily but doesn't want or need absolute perfection.
It's an intriguing toy, which I'll have to play with more when it's a bit less Slashdotted. (It's a beta, and is unsurprisingly swamped.) Of course, I'm only contributing to that here, but I figure some readers may want to try it out themselves...
The basic idea is that it's a general mashup tool for RSS feeds. You define "pipes" that are feeds plus a variety of operators, allowing you to combine and edit feeds at will using a graphical editor. At the end, you wind up with a single combined feed that better reflects what you're looking for.
It's really quite cute -- you define pipes by dragging these boxes around and connecting them as desired. It's aiming at a somewhat awkward middle tech level: not quite as all-powerful as the true hacker might want, and not yet easy enough for the ordinary user. Still, it may well be appropriate for someone like myself, who knows enough to be able to use it, wants more-customized feeds easily but doesn't want or need absolute perfection.
It's an intriguing toy, which I'll have to play with more when it's a bit less Slashdotted. (It's a beta, and is unsurprisingly swamped.) Of course, I'm only contributing to that here, but I figure some readers may want to try it out themselves...