YAHOO Pipes

Yahoo has come up with yet another Web 2.0 gizmo. This one is called Yahoo Pipes. Its like Unix pipes applied to the web!

It goes like this .. anybody with a Yahoo ID can define a “pipe”. A pipe at its most basic form, picks data from “X” source and applies “Y” transform over it and finally provides “Z” output. Here, X could be anything ranging from an RSS/ATOM feed, any URL emiting JSON or XML content (even plain HTML works, I think ..), or it could be user input. Y implies a transform like applying a filter on the data, searching on Yahoo, Google or Flickr etc and Z is the final output you get. The best part is you can do all this “piping” using Yahoo’s web-visual editor (see the pic below), without knowing a thing about XML,HTML,RSS,whatever …

I created a Pipe just for kicks .. its at href="http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.info?_id=jnZ0iPYa3BGXuH3I6kjTQA"

This pipe consumes the RSS feed from digg.com’s technology section and extracts all posts that have the keyword “Google” in it. Simple, but cute !