FAQ on Yahoo Pipes

 

FAQ on Yahoo Pipes What is Pipe? Why Pipe? Why are we giving this attention to pipes? How to build a Pipe? Used Pipe, then what?

 

If you are very new to pipes, then this is where you should start.

 

 

What is Pipe?

Yahoo pipes brings us a framework and an user-interface to fetch, process and use content from around the web.

 

Simply put,

1. You drag-drop required process objects on to a designer
2. link up one or more feeds aka rss/atom as input
3. you get a feed again as output
4. which you can either view on yahoo's output display, or use in your applications, or, as input source for other pipes.

 

If you are wondering why yahoo called this Pipes: They consider this similar to what the unix/linux pipe operator does.

 

Why Pipe?

Content is king on the web.. we need no more proof for that. And finding different ways to present / process content is always good... because the web has overwhelming content. This 'processing content' part is where yahoo pipes help.

 

Why are we giving this attention to pipes?

Probably because this could get interesting and bigger, understanding that the web is a *mine* of content. And presenting the content better, more refined, and more appropriate for different users is getting only more important by the hour.

 

Another reason for giving this attention to Yahoo Pipes is, we all like RSS, and probably RSS we are not able to do much with RSS, other than feed readers and cross-linking on websites. Pipes is going to help us mine/mash-up feeds, and hence the content on the web itself.

 

And, Pipes... enables the non-programmer also to do all that.

 

At a very basic level, may be, many of us on an average have two blogs that we update, and many feeds for people to follow. Without having to write programs, we can simply create a new feed which has the latest of all our other feeds at one place.

 

How to build a Pipe?

The place to know this and do this, is at pipes.yahoo.com.. and rather than bothering about the documentation, probably directly by viewing a pipe and going to edit it and see how it does.. what it does.

 

Used Pipe, then what?

Let us say, we call output of a pipe as a piped feed.

 

While Pipes can help us read and manipulate content feeds better.. we always can use the piped feed in our own applications to present it the way we want. For example, Widgets/Gadgets are a good place to use piped feeds.

 

Also, We could have applications that use piped feeds to link up many different chat applications into one, or many different social networking site messages into one, etc., integrating content, other than just processing or manipulating content.

 

Contributors

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