Have you heard about Yahoo! Pipes? My friend Nicole had mentioned it months ago but you have to really drive home the practicality of a tool before I take interest in it. My question for this particular one wasn’t “What is it?” or “How do you use it?” but “Why use it?” Well there’s a ton of reasons why you would use it but here are some situations of when I would use them.

By using Pipes, I can gather specific information from the web that I want to see. “Information” meaning dynamic content from sites that offer a feed for that content. So let’s say I want to keep up with all the new items from thinkgeek.com. I can get the RSS feed of their “what’s new” things and plug it into my favorite aggregator. Simple enough. But what if I was only interested in seeing new items in their Gadgets category? Well, since thinkgeek doesn’t have a filter option for their “what’s new” items, I can use Pipes and apply a filter to their RSS feed so that only item titles containing the word “gadgets” come through. Neat. Then I can run my pipe, publish it, and can use that URL as my new feed. Here’s the final product. So what else is there?

Well let’s say you owned Conferences Sine Corpus and you had a feed available for your PR page and most of the time, you used the acronym “CSC.”  By using Pipes, you can replace “CSC” with “Conferences Sine Corpus” and use this pipe as your feed so that readers can easily know what it stands for.

You can even create a pipe that will lookup craigslist for apartments in Philly that are less than $800/mo and attach a map that will show where the apartments are (housingmaps.com is a mashup that does something like this).

I love its “bubbly” interface and I’m sure there are a ton of other things you can do with it but at least you can get a sense of why people would use such a tool. It’s intuitive and if you want to learn more about how to actually use it, you can watch the official movie tutorial to learn how to use it.

Submitted by: RayAna Park, Former Web Developer
on January 11, 2008 - 5:05 pm

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