Friday, February 9, 2007

Yahoo Pipes: DIY mash-ups

Yahoo actually released a product so ahead of the curve that industry analysts are shocked that Google didn't beat them to the punch and the site was overwhelmed with traffic and down for most of yesterday.

Yahoo Pipes is an online app that allows users to create their own mashups via drag-and-drop, currently using RSS and Atom feeds. They hope to expand to other technologies in the future, allowing users to combine multiple online calendars, Google Maps, news feeds, blog feeds, etc. into a single data center.

Tim O'Reilly called it "a milestone in the history of the internet."

I tried it out last night, and while it's not the easiest thing to to figure out, I see the potential.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

I would be very interested in seeing what new ideas you come up with using Yahoo Pipes. Any ideas? Any volunteers?

Harmony said...

I've made a fairly simple first attempt: "Recipes from Restaurants Near a Location"

It creates an RSS feed from the results of a Yahoo Local search for "Restaurants," pulls out the title from each item in the feed, and runs a Yahoo search for that title within the http://copyKat.com website.

It's not too 'Mashed' of a mash-up since it uses mostly Yahoo components and a few filters, but it's an example of being able to add a little more customization to search utilities.

Check it out here:
http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/GqogD8S62xGhrURFJjBjOg