Yahoo! Pipes Are Cool
Yahoo! Pipes is a visual RSS slicing, dicing, and meshing tool. Basically you can take any feeds you like, add them together, and apply a bit of filtering. It is fairly intuitive and a lot a of fun for a wannabe programmer like me. And then when you create something, someone else can clone your pipes and add more stuff to it.
Here are some cool ways to use Yahoo! Pipes:
- track the latest news in your industry (filtering by sources, keywords, or both)
- track domain and marketplace offers like Shoemoney does here
- track inbound links or mentions by syncing up blog search tools
- see how fast ideas are spreading by tracking all the major social sites and blog search engines at the same time
- watch eBay price trends (and just about any other trend which you can subscribe to)
- see which Yahoo! Pipes are spreading, think of how you can improve those ideas or apply them to other markets
- if you are dirty or aggressive about monetization ;) create a Pipe that is a core to many other pipes that pulls data from major websites like eBay while using your affiliate links in your Pipes
Tim O'Reilly has a great post about how the concept of Pipes could be highly valuable.
Published: February 8, 2007 by Aaron Wall in seo tools
Comments
@Milan Kryl
I agree.. but you can make some nice pipes overthere.. not only with rss. You can combine several things to make it like you want. I dont know how to benefit from it now either. But why not play with it and make some for the future.
Tools like Pipes get even more powerful when you combine them with such services as dapper.net or openkapow.com (especially the second one imho), which you can use to generate feeds (or REST services) from virtually any website. Using such combination, you can create the ultimate mash-up.
I love new technology. Yahoo pipes looks very interesting, I'll have to start braining storming how it could be used within an overall search marketing strategy. I wonder how well the service will take off? Any predictions?
A bit more waves in still waters of web x.0
I like it, but I haven't any idea what use it for. I hope it'll come ;-)
I don't find that they can actually *do* anything. IMO, they suck, but the idea is powerful.
Hey Aaron,
cool stuff and a pity I missed these back in February (found it just now)
Did you btw find some feature where I can make Yahoo call up my custom code for processing in between?
cheers,christoph
I have not looked at these in a while Christoph, so I am not sure what all can be done with them. I am trying to launch a big big project soon. :)
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