Pipes and Filters For The River of Information

Yahoo Pipes offers access to the data and information constantly streaming along the Internet in an accessible way to web programmers and non-programmers. The user interface involves dragging and dropping boxes and connectors, then clicking choices from a drop-down list.

I really do feel like I’m riding on a river of information most days, and have adopted a more serendipitous, free-flowing sense of when I’ll get the next bit of information that’s useful to me. But with content aggregation and the power of the filtering mechanisms, the river becomes a stream becomes a pipe with customized clear drinking water in a manageable fountain spray rather than a fire hose. But if you do want to drink from the Social Media Firehose, I recommend that Pipe. It uses data from all the big name social media sites, including Flickr, Twitter, Friendfeed, and Digg.  The beauty of these pipes is that you can build on what others have created. Unfortunately, with a product name like iMIS and a company name like ASI, I’d prefer to filter the list of results by English language content only, but that filter isn’t available on the content from those feeds apparently.

Corvida on the Read Write Web has done an excellent job of gathering and categorizing the most popular Yahoo Pipes and giving explanations of each in The Ultimate Yahoo! Pipes Creations List. She lists three categories for these pipes: Social Submission and Aggregation Yahoo Pipes, Pricing Alert Yahoo Pipes – Catch That Deal! and Media Yahoo Pipes.

If you’ve ever been frustrated with the way that Joomla handles feeds, you might do what the Kingman Bicycle Outfitters webmaster did – created a Yahoo Pipes badge of cycling news feeds.

Or if you’re the site designer for the Calistoga Inn and you want to show pictures of the lovely area surrounding your Inn, you’d create a Yahoo Pipe badge that shows photos on a map.

Now, one immediate caveat to the Yahoo Pipes service is that it does not have a Service Level Agreement so access could disappear one day. I’m not sure what you’d do to substitute a custom-built pipe. Grazr offers custom-built feed processing tools and a similar “badge” for inserting content from feeds on your website. But it would appear that all the excitement and energy surrounds Yahoo Pipes. What are other great examples you’ve seen lately?