I’ve had some time to play with Yahoo!’s new RSS mixing service, Pipes, and I’m impressed with the possibilities. Unfortunately, there’s still a hefty number of bugs, and some features are sorely lacking (experienced coders will probably be most annoyed by being forced at working in a visual environment and not being able to look at the actual code). Still, even in its current state Pipes is offering a myriad of interesting possibilities. I will, of course, leave out the simple stuff which you can do with any RSS mixer, and focus on remixing that can only be done with Pipes. Without further ado, here are five cool ways to use Pipes.
1. Playlist images
What is it and how it’s done? This pipe takes a user input - a Last.FM username - then grabs the last 10 played tracks for that user, and replaces this input with 5 Flickr images for each feed item, hopefully related to the musician in the playlist.
How useful is it? It’s pretty cool. You don’t have to do much, just use Last.FM as you would regularly do, and this pipe will show you related images. It would be even better if I could do the same thing for videos or album covers, however I don’t think it can be done at this point (what’s lacking is the ability to analyse feed content, and pass this analysis to two different pipes). If anyone has an idea how to do this, please let me know.
Problems? See the connection that leads nowhere in the left side of the workspace? It’s a bug. It doesn’t do any damage, it’s just a visual glitch. Also, I chose a name of an actual Last.FM user as default simply because this user’s last tracks feed returns some results, which often isn’t the case. I hope he/she doesn’t mind.
Link: http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/ONlam5K62xGFsczFr8cPhQ/
RSS: http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/ONlam5K62xGFsczFr8cPhQ/run?_render=rss
2. Related stories
What is it and how it’s done? This is not my idea nor my pipe, but it’s more advanced than anything I could do so I’ve decided to include it here. The author does a Technorati search to find articles related to articles on his blog, and includes the links via some Ajax code. You can see the blog (with the related stories underneath each article) here, and the code is here.
How useful is it? Similar functionality exists, for example, in Wordpress plugins, but the great thing about this approach is the fact that you can easily change the source of the related stories: it doesn’t have to be Technorati, it can be anything. In other words, it’s a really useful multi-purpose blog plugin.
Link: http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/AHaR2Y242xGwcHpiZFUMqA/
3. News in English
What is it and how it’s done? Reddit, Netscape, and Digg are not enough for you? Aching to read what the Europeans are voting on, but you just don’t have the language skills? No worries. In this pipe, I’ve taken the top 10 items from Spanish site Meneame.net, as well as German and French versions of Wikio, and created a single feed in English.
How useful is it? Well, it’s not bad. I’ve taken a silly example, but being able to take feeds in many different languages and turn them into one feed in a language of your choice will surely be very useful for many users.
Link: http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/2E8akQO62xGrchCW0kqv4w/
RSS: http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/2E8akQO62xGrchCW0kqv4w/run?_render=rss
4. The travel fanatic
What is it and how it’s done? Planning a trip? It takes research and time. Or maybe you can do a single pipe which will give you all the answers you need in a second? Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you: the travel fanatic. Seemingly most complex of all the pipes here, it’s actually quite simple to make. It combines Flickr images, Yahoo Answers, and Yahoo News related to the location. (Various other feeds could be added, but I chose only these three for simplicity’s sake.) This results in a very comprehensive feed with a lot of information on the place you’re planning to visit.
How useful is it? Pretty damn useful, I would say. With a bit of tweaking this single feed replaces what would previously be an entire service.
Link: http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/ZGq6pJm62xGxnbZme_gC8A/
RSS: http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/ZGq6pJm62xGxnbZme_gC8A/run?_render=rss
5. Fligg, Fleddit and Fletscape
What is it and how it’s done? Browse Digg through Flickr. The idea comes from this Pipe, which lets you browse through New York Times stories by replacing each story with a several related images from Flickr. I’ve simply replaced it with Digg, so credit for this goes to the author of the aforementioned pipe. However, I also wanted to do something different, so I chose to include both the stories and the related images, with mixed success.
*Update: For Reddit and Netscape lovers, I’ve added Flickr browsing for these sites also.
How useful is it? Not very. The description of Digg stories is analysed via the content analysis module, the result of which is used to fetch a single image from Flickr. Most of the time it’s completely unrelated, but sometimes it works. Nevertheless, it’s a fun way to read Digg stories.
Problems? Yes. I was unable to sort the feed in such a way so that the actual image from Flickr appears after the Digg story to which it’s related. It would be simple to do if Pipes supported some counter which would add a new field with a number to each feed, which could be used for sorting, however I haven’t found a way to do it. If someone has an idea, please let me know. At this point it’s not all that useful, but I’ve decided to include it because it shows the kinds of problems you can run into when you try to do some complex piping.
*Update: someone smarter than me figured it out, and posted it in the comments under the name “hapdaniel”. So, here’s the pipe that sorts the Digg and Flickr items one after the other: http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/mIJDNLm92xG2nAguFG_cUw/
Link: (Digg, only Flickr images)
http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/OhruDKC62xGVgXkcjwtvUw/
RSS: (Digg, only Flickr images)
http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/OhruDKC62xGVgXkcjwtvUw/run?_render=rss
Link: (Reddit, only Flickr images)
http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/DiJJptm62xGe58jaHxeTaQ/
RSS: (Reddit, only Flickr images)
http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/DiJJptm62xGe58jaHxeTaQ/run?_render=rss
Link: (Netscape, only Flickr images)
http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/PP2brtm62xG1dhzxE2_cUw/
RSS: (Netscape, only Flickr images)
http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/PP2brtm62xG1dhzxE2_cUw/run?_render=rss
Link: (both Flickr images and Digg stories)
http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/qux2krm52xGJarAmZoQMOQ/
RSS: (both Flickr images and Digg stories)
http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/qux2krm52xGJarAmZoQMOQ/run?_render=rss
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Fligg, Fleddit and Fletscape problems
yeah, that’s what annoys me most. text visualization via flickr is great, but pipes doesn’t allow to grab only the image and mix it with a rss.
hi. nice article. Actually I have been playing around with yahoo pipes since yesterday. Its kewl…but didnt get time to go thru all the features it has except the adding RSS.
Now I know, thanks
merlinvicki
Yahoo pipes is new to me, and after your post got to the front page of digg, i thank you for showing me this new service.
– Phil
The annotate feature should allow you to align the images with the Digg stories, but it’s buggy right now. You would set it up so that one of the attributes of the digg story (description would be best) was replaced by setting the annotate feature to use the flickr description instead. Can’t get it to work so far though, and any optional attributes you add instead are stripped by the Yahoo reader.
I did the digg/reddit to flickr mashup awhile ago before pipes came out. You can see it at http://www.snapbuzz.com
If you’ve got a Mac a great thing to do is to actually build your own custom widgets for the Dashboard using the Dashcode Beta.
I made a pipe a few days ago. It takes your last.fm username and then gets your last ten played, using that it polls amazon webservices xml feed for the most likely match and turns your playlist into a a series of affiliate links so instead of showing the last ten played on your website with links to last.fm you show links to buy the related albums on amazon.com
http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/zMGOrlO42xGtP_LkJphxuA/
I like your translation example/idea. Questsin
Offers an RSS feed that does semantic expansion. Seems like a good fit for a yahoo pipes mashup.
@Eric: very nice application, I like the clean look and the functionality.
@Bill: cool idea.
Hey, try using Yahoo Pipes with my RSS to PDF webservice at http://rss2pdf.com
You can create your own mix of RSS feeds and then export it as a PDF, making a kind of PDF Newspaper or Magazine out of your favorite feeds !
The PDF files are easy to read on mobile devices or to send to your friends..
I recommend the option without images because sometimes my service chokes on feeds containing images…but check it out ;–)
- Tom Churm
Creator Guy, RSS 2 PDF
http://rss2pdf.com
I developed a pipe similar to your foreign language news pipe. I work at Dickinson College, which has a blog setup for classes, students studying abroad, etc. I’m interested in reading the posts, but a large number of them are in either Spanish or French. I developed three pipes:
The first inputs the blog posts and tries to figure out if it is french and only outputs the french posts:
http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/oOaj3Wu42xGCBDeIr_ymrA/
The second does the same process, but with spanish:
http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/Chz0o2_42xGAbpyTr_ymrA/
The third pipe inputs the blog and removes any foreign language posts, then combines that with the previous two pipes, after translating them to English. The net result is the entire blog in English:
http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/kju2f3C42xGYGTWUZVUMqA/
So far, my crude techniques for determining language have worked, but the tools which Yahoo provides make that difficult.
Thanks for bringing pipes to my attention. It’s good to see Yahoo innovating. You’d think that only one search company did software. I think we’re only beginning to scratch the surface of this technology at the moment - the potential is fantastic.
amazing overlook of the service, going to try some now.
adbritescript: go spam somewhere else. If your going to do that at least contribute to the conversation, no one cares where you came from.
Nice. I have just started playing with this and you’ve given me a couple of great ideas. Thanks. I never thought I would be saying this to a man, but Nice pipes.
Yeah, maybe I’ll never say that again.
It’s a good interface but I don’t seem to be able to get a Russian RSS feed translated into English - tried on a few now. Works fine the other way round though so maybe Babelfish has some issues there.
Did you try Pipes with Anothr.com combination? It’s the real time alert with pipes output.
Thanks a lot for the inspiration. I will give it a try myself.
Check out the pipe I made, displays movie trailers of the most recently released DVDs
http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/wNfbs0e42xG1uNcNZVUMqA
Have you noticed that the text input module doesn’t seem to work when the name of the input has spaces? I was just trying out your “Travel Fanatic” pipe and it would only show results for London (it still works correctly when debugging, though). I found that changing the text input name to one word (e.g. “destination”) allowed it work.
@nezha: I’ll try it out, thanks for the tip.
@Rob: I haven’t noticed that, I’ll go over there and fix that.
@everyone: sorry if the site is unreachable. It’s not because it can’t handle the traffic, it’s a known issue which happens now and then and my hosting provider is trying to resolve it for quite some time now.
Is this what you wanted for Digg and Flickr:
http://pipes.yahoo.com/people/qP_5MDk7qXMHamsaBjG57rVRFLw.
@hapdaniel: I have no time for checking it out thoroughly atm, but it seems to be working exactly as I wanted! Thanks, I’ll update the article with your pipe when I get home.
This was a great article. I like the emphasis on USEFULNESS. It’s hard to find any truly useful pipes. I think (hope) that someone will come up with a pipe that is so useful that the non-tech crowd will start paying attention. I created some high-quality video tutorials for Yahoo Pipes. With your permission, here is the link:
http://usefulvideo.blogspot.com/2007/02/yahoo-pipes-tutorials.html
Still learning a lot about yahoo pipes.
The next step for us is to create a feed module for Joomla CMS that pumps yahoo pipe feeds. This is going to be a interesting development for us.
I haven’t yet tried out Yahoo pipes, I’ve been meaning to, but I fail to see where it could be better than simply writing your own rss aggravator.
Only partially related, but I think this is also a “cool way to use pipes” although only the concept not the Yahoo implementation. I’ve tried to use the same concepts with a different front-end though. You could check my attempt at http://soarack.blogspot.com
Hi to everyone!!!
I’ve been playing around a new website,http://www.rss2.co.uk/, which aims at providing webmasters a tool for providing their sites’ RSS feeds as a PDF document. It allows aggregating up to 5 feeds into a single PDF document. You can even choose the font for the PDF. The site also offers tools for adding this capability to any website, much like rss2pdf does but with several advantages over it.
Kind regards,
Iván
Traffic – the current of visitors web-site.
Robotraff.com is automatics selling system of traffic
Only at us, You may choose country, categories and browsers version (for advanced). If you choose the traffic for buy then you must fill the order form at menu “Traffic panel”( You must resisted) and pay your order. (we accept more 15th electronic currency). After order is paid, you receive a special web links where you may watch a statistics of order. Customer, please pay attention minimal one order was been 1000 unique visitors (UV).
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Friend of mine at Berkeley created some great pipes for searching the scientific literature - find out more on Sciencebase
This tutorial shows off the Regex Module in Yahoo Pipes: http://theytookmystapler.blogspot.com/2007/09/yahoo-pipes-case-study-of-using-regex.html
Hi! Today I found a five remarkable pipes. Look 5 Most Useful Pipes please.