Under the sink with Pipes

Posted November 1st, 2007 at 7:27 pm by Jonathan Trevor, Yahoo! Pipes Team

Number of Comments One Comment / Filed in: Trends & News

It’s been eight months since we launched Pipes, a tool that lets people with limited technical expertise mash-up any data on the Internet and make it their own. It’s amazing to see the variety of Pipes that people have been building using the simple visual editor we provide. These range from translating text from one language to another, to searching for the best apartments near a park, to monitoring hundreds of RSS feeds for certain topics.

Here are some of our favorites:

The “GeoAnnotated Reuters News” application takes an RSS feed from the Reuters news service, and “geocodes” each item, making it possible to show where that news item is happening on a world map!
The “Hot Deals Search” scans many online deal-hunting sites for the best prices available. You can search for particular items or just let the pipe find the best of what’s available.
The “Kiva Loans by Location” gathers a list of the micro-loans people are making through the Kiva site, and shows the amazing variety of people and places these loans are making an impact on.
The “Yahoo Unanswered Questions” pipe searches Yahoo! Answers for questions that don’t currently have an answer, so you can show how smart you are and answer those tricky questions.
The “My Flickr Contacts’ Faves” is a complicated set of pipes built on top of the Flickr API that pulls the last five photos that have been favorited by each of your friends in the Flickr network. Great for seeing what photos your friends find interesting at-a-glance.

We’ve gone mobile, too. Straight from our recent internal Yahoo! Hack Day, we now have an iPhone interface that lets you access mash-ups from your mobile – so you can find the nearby sushi joint with Yahoo! Local or answer the call of nature with the restroom locator.

We’ve also updated Pipes with a more powerful search mechanism. Now you can easily sort through the thousands of Pipes to find the ones that interest you — and then use them — or re-mash them to suit your needs. This feature is just one of many that we’ve released since launching, but many others come from our community of developers. Feedback on discussion forums and message boards really do help us prioritize features and fixes, so please tell us what you think or drop us a line! And we’re making updates to Pipes all the time, so it’s worth subscribing to our blog to keep up with what’s new.

We’ve seen some great Pipes created and used since we’ve launched, by developers and non-developers alike. And we’re just getting warmed up. Stay tuned as we continue to bring you more exciting new features and Pipes to test out.

Jonathan Trevor
Yahoo! Pipes Team