I was just having a look at SEOmoz’s Web 2.0 Awards winners. And I noticed something called “Yahoo! Pipes” in 1st place for the Web Development category. Out of my curiosity, I headed over to Yahoo! Pipes. After a little bit of exploring, what I realized was that Yahoo! Pipes deserved the 1st place under the Web Development category!
So what exactly are Yahoo! Pipes?, you’d ask me.
Well, Pipes are tools which can allow you to gather various content from all over the web, filter it, transform it, modify it and do what not, and then present it again! That too, in a format you like! Still confused?
Okay, imagine, that you have been visiting a lot of blogs about a particular topic. You’re subscribed to a zillion feeds. At times, you would still want to look out for specific content and track it separately amongst those feeds. Now reading about something in particular across multiple feeds or sources is surely a big pain! You suddenly start to think if you could somehow combine multiple feeds so that you get exactly what you wanted. Forget feeds, imagine if you could combine content from feeds and multiple websites. Imagine if you to extract particular portions from multiple websites and generate a unified feed for them! Sounds a bit far-fetched? Enter - Yahoo! Pipes.
With Yahoo! Pipes, all that is mentioned above is possible. Well, I guess you’ve heard about pipes in Unix. Yahoo! Pipes is the web version. Pipes provides you with multiple modules, which range from simple ones like getting user input, formatting strings, and stuff to the more typical ones like applying regex expressions to content. And if you’re wondering where to get the content from, then let me tell you, you have a whole lot of like 11 modules (as of now) to get content from various sources, may it be an RSS feed, or a web page, or a CSV file on the web, or just about anything. It even as a module that searches for images from Flickr!
Using pipes is fairly simple. You just need to drag the modules and they will appear as boxes with configurable parameters on a canvas. You need to make sure that the final output you desire is connected to Pipe Output. I’ve setup a simple pipe that allows you to search the RSS feeds for AkashBhavsar.com. You can check the pipe output here and if you need to see the structure, you can do that as well here.
One incredibly good thing about the Pipes that you make is that the content output from the Pipes will be indexed by search engines. There have been some really creative ideas that have come up, like searching for an apartment on maps, searching for geo-tagged photos and so on. You can go over and browse some Pipes and get a feel for yourself. And just head over to Yahoo! Pipes and get a hands on experience in creating one yourself!
With such a powerful nifty little tool that Yahoo! has provided us with, rewiring the web doesn’t seem that tough a task! 
Until next time,
Akash.
