Yahoo Pipes: The Ultimate News Aggregator?
Then I heard about it again on the TWiT (This Week in Tech) podcast, and when they described it in their typical simple and straighforward manner, I got it: this was something truly unique, and very cool to boot.
So what is it? Yahoo Pipes (pipes.yahoo.com) is a web application that lets you build custom news/information feeds out of numerous existing feeds using drag-and-drop objects. Think of it as a mashup system for RSS and Atom feeds. Instead of using a news aggregator program to pull down several different RSS feeds about technology, you could build a pipe using Yahoo Pipes that would combine all of those feeds together into one. You could even apply a filter to it: you could configure it so it would only display the items from those feeds containing "ColdFusion" in the title or the body of the articles/posts.
The graphical interface is truly incredible. Programmers and non-programmers alike can build their pipes simply by adding action modules and tying them together. It's hard to describe in words, but you could build a simply pipe by starting with a Fetch module that fetches the feed from a URL you supply, tying it to a Filter module which you configure to only permit items containing your search term through, and then tying the Filter module to the Pipe Output module which returns the results. Once you've finished creating your pipe, you can save it so you can access it via a unique URL and even publish it for public consumption.
I encourage everyone to go check it out. I think I'm going to create a pipe that search the generic tech sites for postings about ColdFusion and Flex. If I do, I may post a link to that pipe in my Links module on the right.
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