The Sexiest Pipe on the Net

Yahoo! Pipes is a new tool in web composition that allows users to “aggregate, manipulate, and mashup content from around the web.” Different data sources including Google Maps, Flickr photos, eBay and Craigslist listings, RSS feeds, and more are available to be combined, parsed, and edited however the creator sees fit. Any combination of data sources imaginable is possible to create useful expositions of linked information. Pipes celebrated its 1 year anniversary last month, so it is still in the initial stages of its evolution, and unfortunately this shows through painfully at times. The concept and ease of use is extremely alluring, but the execution has still been spotty and limited in scope. In browsing through their library of user-created pipes, it was extremely difficult to find interesting, functioning pipes, which is certainly not good. However, there are a large number of creations so maybe the gems are just hidden among the rest of the rubbish. My next step was checking out the Featured Pipe on the main page, “Apartment Near Something”, which would theoretically find apartments in any area within a given distance from anything you could input. A great idea for sure. Unfortunately, no matter what city I input, it would always find the same spot in San Francisco or just generate an error. Considering that this was the featured pipe on the front page, I was quite disappointed.

One of the most useful and semi-functioning pipes that I found was one called “Online Brand Protection”. The concept is to search for your brand or company and see the results containing the term from Google Blogs, Technorati, Blog Pulse, MSN News, and other sources. It is an interesting concept and performed correctly most of the time. There was a persistent error from one or two of the data feeds and some irrelevant results were returned, but a few searches returned useful data. Theoretically, using this brand protection tool often insures that you are always up on the latest buzz concerning whatever brand in which you are interested. Although people truly involved in brand protection have much more sophisticated tools to do the same thing, it is still an interesting concept that is executed fairly well.

 

Pipes, along with Microsoft’s counterpart, Popfly, will continue to improve in both the type of mashups allowed and in the precision of the outputs, but currently the outputs are very rough and at many times frustratingly unusable. As I will be creating a mashup using one of these two tools in the near future, perhaps I will then understand why it is so difficult to make meaningful, useful, functioning productions.

-Michael Wurz

Tags: CS 292, Web 2.0, Mashups, Yahoo, Pipes, Yahoo! Pipes, Popfly, Sex, Naked