Yahoo Pipes: Worth a Look

At the upper right hand corner of your working area are three buttons: New, Save, and Publish. When you have finished your pipe, click Save. You’ll be prompted to name your pipe. Type a name into the text box and hit Save.

After it saves, you’ll see a box at the top of the screen that says “Pipe Saved” and you’ll be able to click on a link labeled “Run Pipe.” That’s always a good idea. Does the pipe grab too much information? Or perhaps it grabs too little (as mine did)? You can always go back and modify your pipe until it gives you what you’re looking for.

You can build much more complicated pipes than the example I gave here. Yahoo points to one called “Apartment Near Something” as a possible inspiration. It starts with a search on Craigslist for apartments as the input and uses the Location Input module to narrow things down by city/state and zip code. Then the pipe accepts text input from the user specifying what they want to find an apartment near (i.e. parks, walking trails, schools, etc). Finally a sort module is added, so the apartments can be sorted by their distance from the desirable item.

As you can see, it’s pretty easy for even a non-programmer to start using this lovely graphical interface. If there is interest, I’ll cover the other areas of the Yahoo Pipes site: the many pipes that are already published, how to publish a pipe so the whole world can see it, the discussion forums, how to clone a pipe, how to build a more complicated pipe, and more. Meanwhile, I think I’ve given you enough to play with for now!