Yahoo Pipes: Worth a Look

It’s easy enough to get started. You go to the Yahoo Pipes page and click on My Pipes. Before I take you there, let me show you a screen shot of the page:

It doesn’t really do the page justice, but I think you can see that it lends itself to poking around. When I checked the page, the left column (“About Pipes”) made a number of interesting suggestions as to what you can do with Yahoo Pipes; the middle column was devoted to popular pipes; and the right column talked about updates. One recent update I’m sure many of you will be interested in explained how to use Yahoo Maps with Yahoo Pipes.

If you’re ready to build a pipe, just click on My Pipes. You’ll need to log in to Yahoo; it should come as no surprise that you can’t use the service unless you’re registered. Once you log in, you reach a page that says “Looks like you don’t have any Pipes. Why not create one?” It links to an editing page for creating your first Pipe. You’ll also find links to example pipes. You should be warned that example pipes seem to take quite a while to load. I didn’t want to wait, so I thought I’d better just try putting one together myself.

Thankfully, Yahoo provides a simple overview so I had some idea of what I’d be doing, at least in principle. I’m not a programmer by any stretch of the imagination, so those of you who are more tech savvy can laugh at my halting steps. You can also find a complete list of Pipes modules and other useful information in Yahoo’s documentation for Yahoo Pipes.