Piping hot *Updated*
Posted: Friday, February 09, 2007 11:57 AM by Will Femia
Without question the most popular toy online since my last post is Yahoo! Pipes.
Now that I've spent the morning playing with it I think I at least understand what it does even if I don't quite have a handle on all of the features. Basically it's a tool for setting up a string of feeds and filters. RSS feeds alone send headlines and content from a site to your RSS aggregator or reader. But what if you want to combine two RSS feeds into one? Or if the feed is too broad and you only want certain headlines? Pipes provides you with an array of tools to let you customize what your feeds provide to you. The most popular pipe right now looks like it takes NY Times headlines from their main news feed and runs the words against Flickr tags, ultimately spitting out photos that pertain to the headlines. You may need to sign in to a free Yahoo account. Also look for a "run this feed" button if you're not seeing anything.
I noticed they had Babelfish as one of the tools so I made a couple pipes of my own just to see if I really understood it. I went to La Repubblica, the Italian newspaper, and found their feed list. I then created a pipe that takes the top news headlines from the feed, translates them to English and filters out anything that doesn't have the word Bush in the title or description. Now I've built a tool for monitoring Italian coverage of the president. The only problem is that I didn't get any results because none of their headlines are about President Bush right now. So I went for the obvious immediate gratification solution and changed Bush to Anna.
By the way, after a few minutes of maddening clicking I realized the whole thing assembles by dragging, not clicking. What makes it easier to learn is that you can click on each module you add and see the results at that point in the chain (er... pipe). When I wasn't getting any results with Bush I could click the translation module and see that the headlines were indeed being translated but nothing was coming out of the filter module.
I still have a stack of links to read to see what folks are saying about Pipes, but I wanted to share this much with you because it really is a fun thing to play with if you're looking to burn off the end of your Friday afternoon. I'll add "updated" to the headline of this entry when I narrow down the list to some recommended analysis pieces to read.
UPDATE: I see in the comments that some people are a little intimidated by this, and to be sure there are parts that go right over my head as well. I approached it like eating at a buffet. You build your plate and it's OK if you don't know what some of the stuff is as long as you end up with a meal. A lot of the "about" language uses "remix" and "mashup" which I usually associate with music, so there's probably a handy metaphor there. If the information on a Web site is a song, this gives you the tools to cut and rearrange that song, or mix it with other songs.
I also like the music metaphor because Pipes can seem like a solution to a problem you didn't even know you had, which is say, no problem at all. But it can also stand as a means of expressing creativity with information as the medium. Like any new medium, it requires a change in perspective, but even that in itself is welcome.
I'm also reading a lot of phrases like "the future of RSS" and "the full potential of RSS." I think that's what's resonating with me the most because I've always only been halfway impressed with RSS feeds. So what if I can have the headlines from a site show up in an aggregator; it's not that big a deal for me to go to the site and read the headlines there. But if I, as a person who knows almost zero about programming, can take the information from a site and mix and mash it into something that no site is already offering, well that's a big deal.
It's interesting to see a number of people talk about how this has been an idea long in the making. While it may seem like a challenge to think up a problem that can be solved with Pipes, for a lot of people this is simply the latest step in an evolving technology.
The link I should have clicked yesterday morning is: Yahoo! Pipes: The Modules For Building Pipes. Meanwhile I see there are a number of instructional pipe posts from this guy linked in the margin.
This one takes you through the steps of creating a pipe for "apartments near something."
Following along with the pipe editor open is particularly useful.
Yahoo pipes and Google Earth - Most notable is the story of the guy who spent time coding up something that will soon be possible for the most code-ignorant to create themselves (or find from someone else) as a Yahoo Pipe.
Speaking of coders, Pipes is really best viewed through their eyes. Anil Dash does a helpful job contextualizing it in terms of other similar efforts. It may be worth noting that the name "pipes" has its root in Unix, but I can't even get through the Wikipedia entry on that.
ONE MORE LOOSE ENDS UPDATE: We should do this one as a headline contest. I'm seeing a million plays on the "pipes" idea.
For those who don't want to go through the trouble of a Yahoo login, what you see when you "run the pipe" varies depending on what the pipe does. For the New York Times through Flickr pipe you see a long string of photos from Flickr. The photos are all associated with the words in the NY Times headlines. For the ones I did with the Italian Newspaper, you see a few story excerpts with very awkwardly translated text. As the Google Earth item in the first update shows, a pipe may just spit out a link that you can then plug into Google Earth and see information plotted on the map. Some of the pipe modules call for user input, so you can enter a location and have it spit back a list of real estate results from several listings sites at once. For that matter, instead of a list you could probably have it produce a URL to a map. That's beyond my ability (this morning) to actually do, but not hard imagine.
For folks who don't see the slighted hope of learning to use this, don't forget that part of the point is that it's "social" so people who make them are sharing them. If you liked my little Italian newspaper pipe but wanted it to follow a different word, you could find my pipe in a search, copy it, change that bit and save it as your own. For that matter, you don't have to change anything. You could find one in there that does something you've been looking for. Maybe it takes the sports RSS feeds from every paper in your city, mixes them all together and filters them for just the one team you like and gives you those headlines. If that pipe doesn't exist yet, it probably will soon and you can take the feed from that pipe and plug it into your reader... free.
