Put RSS in your Yahoo! pipe and smoke it
At first glance Yahoo! Pipes seems to be a way to re-mix feeds, all within a social network, straight away I think of Feed Collectors, Feedbite, and kinja, but it is way more than this.
It also lets you clone a pipe, as a basis for a new pipe, similar to the way Ning and Webjam offer for their products.
It seems to allow you to mashup feed data via a GUI…similar services are Dapple, Plagger, Teqlo, and QEDwiki.
It delivers pipe content to JSON, RSS, email and SMS…you can also search your pipe which generates a feed.
Yahoo! Pipes is the first sophisticated RSS masher, prior to this we have:
- splicing feeds
- boolean filtering (search feeds)
- MySyndicaat and Feed Digest even dedupe items with the same title or URL
- SuprGlu can splice feeds and then output content into author tags, MySyndicaat also outputs content via user tags, and also allows you to create a synonym ring (I don’t think these tags have their own RSS feed)
Splicing, deduping and filtering feeds is only a few of the features offered by Yahoo! Pipes, there is lots more data manipulation available, they call these modules.
More than just RSS mixing, it allows you to manipulate the data at a granular level, eg. translate data, scan for location metadata within the feed source, limit items in the feed, sort the items in the feed.
An example of how it stands out from other RSS remixers is that you can do things like take a news service feed and mash it up with a Flickr feed, this matches photo’s to news stories, see the New York Times thru Flickr.
Check out the overview and examples.
I’m finding it hard to understand how to use it, maybe I’m not techie enough, see TechCrunch.
It really needs to cater for users that aren’t familiar with the tech lingo, O’Reilly Radar explains it a bit more.
From what I see this is bringing mashups to the masses (I don’t mean the mainstream), only if the masses could understand how to use it. Some fans of RSS remixing may be a little frustrated as they have been waiting for this type of functionality, but find it hard to operate…arghh!
Newsmastering was first advocated by Robin Good and Rok Hrastnik was the biggest fan, and Richard MacManus told us a while back the RSS remixing was going to be huge.
See their articles:
Yahoo Launches Pipes, an RSS Remixer
Beyond NewsMastering: Yahoo! Pipes Is The Internet RSS Remixer - Overview And Reports
Yahoo! Pipes a Dream Come True for RSS Marketers … and a Huge Threat.
NOTE: There will be lots of data tinkering by the likes of Tony Hirst, and Marjolein Hoekstra.
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