Today, perhaps we are witnessing the emergence of a revolutionary concept – the World Wide Web is being re-mixed. Now the parts of the new web has crystallized into different segments like blogs, photos, audio and videos, maps, RSS, social network profiles and many more and more over the old HTML pages have formed a quite impressive network ready to be mined and re-mix. It is the new systematic thinking of considering the web as a database, a relational database to be precise and that is where mash up of the data is being required. Web mash ups are no new concept. The web mash up can be considered as an application to combine data from more than one web sources and to form a single integrated web application out of all the data it has accumulated. But up until a few years ago all these were quite complicated and were not accessible to most internet usurers apart from a few techies. But yahoo pipe has changed the scenario quite a bit by finally bringing in the premise of news mastering to the mass. The general idea behind the yahoo pipes is to allow the user to connect various web sources, mix them in different ways with additional functionality added to them and finally create a new single output pertaining directly to the user’s requirements.
The pipe offered by yahoo can be considered as a mile stone in the internet service. The yahoo pipes normally generalize the idea of mash up in a GUI with a drag and drop editor to enable the user to connect internet data sources and then process and redirect the output. In web terms a mash up is used to combine data or functionality from more than one source to create a new service, implying fast integration of data sources for enriched results. The main conception behind is combination, visualization and aggregation. As UNIX pipes are used to combine data from various sources, but generally are not considered sufficient for a being a useful application. Here yahoo pipes may emerge as a potential solution. It is a web application developed by yahoo for building data mash ups and can be considered as a data mashup tool instead of a complete mash up editor.
The yahoo pipe is indeed a remarkable offering, the first GUI builder for the biggest database of the world and that is the World Wide Web itself. It is more inventive and no easier than its predecessors like the Visual basic or the Power Builder. But yahoo pipes enable the developers to remix the building blocks of the web with a remarkable simplicity. The primary function of yahoo pipe is to create new pages by accumulating RSS feeds from different sources with the many modules provided by it that can either be used to grab data from different sources or to edit data that is grabbed. The pipes modules are grouped into many categories like sources, user inputs, operators, URL, string, date, location and number.
Now what could be termed as the usefulness of using yahoo pipes? Let’s suppose that you are a frequent visitor to different Q&A sites, a very favorite one of mine is the yahoo answers.com where users ask and answer nearly anything, how much obscure and niche it is. But to visit the site everyday to find out if there is something essential or relevant for you don’t sound like a very good idea. There come the yahoo pipes. It is capable of doing some pretty tricky things, but for now what we really want to do is just ordinary, takes a feed from answers, search for questions with the keywords provided and deliver them into a new RSS stream discarding everything else that is not relevant.
Here is a screenshot of the GUI that you are provided to work with. First you drag and drop the fetch seed icon from the main sidebar on the graphical area which will create a box with a text field. Get the feed URL of the most relevant categories of your favorite Q&A sites and paste them into the text box. If more than one query is applicable you can always add a new text field for it.
Then you are supposed to drag the filter module and drop it in between the feed output box and the fetch feed module. You can add your key words here and there is also the drop down fields to provide more flexibility. You can always insert more than one key word for your queries and to filter the questions that you need and you ore quite finished with creating your first yahoo pipe. Connect the feed to the filter and the filter to the output, just save the pipe and hit the run this pipe button. This will redirect you to a new page where you can subscribe to this new feed. But still you are too lazy or busy to read your feed reader daily, and then you can always go one step further and use the ‘feedmyinbox’ option to take the feed address and deliver the feed in your inbox whenever there is a question for your interest.
While all these things may sound like standard RSS filtering and aggregation, yahoo pipes goes much further than anything in the scenario. It can aggregate almost any kind of XML feed, which means that the user can now aggregate that data feed with all other different feeds he might be interested in and create a single RSS feed only to be subscribed to his RSS reader. As it allows content manipulation also by applying various filters like sort count, truncate, joins and the user can even create their own filters. The pipe user can also browse through pipes created by other users and also use them or modify them in his personal way. Actually the pipe application enables the user to pipe information from different sources and then setting up rules to modify the content.
And there is then of course the question of some profit that can be achieved through this application. As a marketer, the user really has opportunities galore like providing highly relevant streams to enrich visitor count and experience and can also have the potential to become the preferred access point of relevant and latest content from like the Q&A forums or blogs and many more are sure to arise in quick time.
So we can come to the point to say that yahoo pipes provides an interactive web based way to create custom feeds and web applications. With the graph based lego like graphic user interface, the pipe user can aggregate data from RSS sources, flickr, yahoo search and many other arbitrary web pages to comb through the accumulated data from any number of sources and moreover can run a stream of results to be read immediately, can subscribe to updates over time or also publish his pipe for other people to view on a web page. In any relational database what used to be a table is now a web page courtesy to the yahoo pipes. Each source of the new relational database that the internet is at present considered can be searched or queried, using parameters either pre-defined or user defined . Still one thing, though everything is done in a visual interface the job might prove a daunting one for the average user, but should not pose any problem to the professionals who either have time to learn the tricks or can pay people who already has the knowledge.
