Yahoo Pipes is a powerful composition tool to aggregate, manipulate, and mash-up content from around the Web from Yahoo! The name of the service pays tribute to Unix pipes, which can make it easy to chain simple utilities together on the command line.
Talk about total control over data. This overwhelming, futuristic application is intimidating at first – but once you get a grip – hold on for an amazing ride.
The application works by enabling users to “pipe” information from different sources and then set up rules for how that content should be modified.
A typical example may be CNN through Google Images, a pipe which takes CNN’s RSS feed and adds a photo from Google Images based on the keywords of each item.
Pipe Building
You make a Pipe by dragging pre-configured modules onto a canvas and wiring them together in the Pipes Editor.
Sharing a Pipe
Once you’ve built a Pipe, you’ll be able save it on Yahoo’s server and then call it like you would any other feed. Pipes offers output in RSS 2.0, RSS 1.0 (RDF), JSON and Atom formats for maximum flexibility. You can also choose to publish your Pipe and share it with the world, allowing other users to clone it, add their own improvements, or use it as a sub-component in their own creations.
I’ve recently set-up my own pipe, to merge my blogs into one seamless feed. I then tied that RSS feed, into my Facebook page. This allows me to bypass Facebook’s single feed dilemma.
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