Not a long time back, people loved Yahoo for its a wide range of services. I still love Yahoo for its fantasy games, finance, games etc. I have been wondering why it has taken a long time to respond to Google threat. Yahoo Pipes could be one response.
While everyone loves to talk about "Web 2.0" as if it is a version of some software, here is a revolutionary technology letting users to create application out of thin air, almost. Attach any number of "pipe"s in series. Here is an example: Create pipe #1 to get results from Google Base, Filter the results in pipe #2, get a price of an item in Amazon, Ebay in pipe #3, and provide the Reviews from CNet in Pipe #4. Now you have all the data you need as a result of one Yahoo Pipe application.
Pipe has huge potential provided there are willing content providers. A new channel to sell data, a new way to create and host applications. One can create an interesting pipe to be sold to others too!
The catch is availability of content. I checked Yahoo Pipes recently and number of supported sources have not increased a lot.
After graduation..
15 years ago
2 comments:
hi. you can actually use any publically accessible data feed in Pipes using the "Fetch Feed" or "Fetch Data" modules. The default set of modules (eg: Yahoo! Local) are just there for convenience's sake.
Yeah. They are useful if content feed is available in specific formats. There are two missing elements: the available feed is too restrictive. One can subscribe only to specific category of content, say CNet's top 10 product reviews or latest 20 craigslist postings. We need more like an API to customize the feed by a specific item - say CNET review for Canon A620 camera.
In addition Yahoo can provide some sort of add-ons/convertors to make use of non-rss/atom content.
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