Yahoo Pipes for Webware

User Reviews

• A visual editor to create data mashups from the web

  geeklessDecember 21, 2013

  Pros

  Highly flexible free online tool. It allows users to customize the presentation of information collected from the web for RSS readers, websites, blogs or to generate new RSS feeds.

  Cons

  Not for the average user. Requires advanced computer skills. Poor documentation. Limited resources are provided.

  Summary

  In 2007 Yahoo introduced Yahoo Pipes, a free, online web application tool with a graphical user interface that enables the aggregation, manipulation, and mashup of content from information available on the web. Data from websites, RSS feeds, Twitter, Myspace, Facebook, Youtube, Flickr and more can be extracted. It can be then inserted on your website or blog, read by your RSS reader, displayed on a map, or used to generate your own feeds - all tailored and presented according to your individual requirements. Looking at some of the pipes that others have created, when it works, it's great. A pipe can be used to search for jobs on multiple job listing sites, search for images, get stock market information, and many more uses limited only by your imagination. The word "Pipes" comes from the pipelines in Unix programming that can create and manage the sequence of processes in software. The interface looks simple and easy to use. Modules are added by the user to provide the components of the pipe, with the modules linked by what looks like blue wavy strands of Medusa's hair, which can be created, dragged and dropped to link up the modules. The construction starts with defining the input sources of the data, which then flow to any number of operations on the data such as filters, sorts, counts, loops and user inputs to arrive at the resulting pipe output. There are many pipes created by other users which you can copy by "cloning" and use as a base for your particular pipe. There is a discussion forum for problems and questions on pipe construction and a documentation page to explain how to use the program. But the documentation is poor, only repeating the terminology used elsewhere on the site without fully explaining the terms or the concepts or offering links to where more detailed explanations or coding information may be obtained. Examples are given that are just a regurgitation of the very basic instructions, and searching for pipes created by others is the major source of information. You are given an inventory of modules to use with a general, but limited, description of each one. Clicking on an empty expression field in a module gives you a selection list with only a half dozen of the most popular expressions. The expressions are never fully explained anywhere and exhaustive searches didn't turn up anything like a complete list of them. The only way that you may even become aware that there are other possible expressions are by viewing other people's pipes. There are free widgets available that provide a template that let you create and sometimes aggregate RSS feeds for an RSS reader or an addition to a website, but they are very limited and often come with the developer's name in the feed box. They may or may not be visible to search engines, which will affect the ranking of the site. Yahoo Pipes says that search engine web crawlers can access pipes once they are published by the user. Pipes doesn't have a high profile and many people are not even aware of its existence. Yahoo has not given the site much in the way of promotion, improvements, or other resources since 2007 so there is always the concern that the site may be abandoned, leaving users high and dry since the pipes are dependent on the existence of the site. A popular RSS news aggregator, Google Reader, was shut down by Google in July 2013 to focus on services that were only used by most of the population rather than a small part of it. The strength of Yahoo Pipes is its flexibility but it comes at a cost. Although its interface makes it look easy, not just anyone would be able to build a complex pipe structure. Although they say you can produce a pipe without ever having to write a line of code, you are going to have to know the code before you can create anything more than the simplest pipe. You will need advanced computer skills as well as a bottomless reservoir of patience and make Yahoo Pipes a viable, useful tool for you.

  ---

• Show reviewsHide reviews
• Rate it