Yahoo Pipes, Looks cool but whats it about?

[forcelite]

A friend told me about Yahoo pipes, and I cant seem to figure out what its about. If anyone has any insight to this I would greatly appreciate it.

http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/

Force



Someone please move this to the off-topic forum. I accidentally put it here, sorry

[Desert_Seg]

Yahoo pipes is nothing more than a "pretty" way to see various data feeds (RSS, HTML Fetch, etc).

Just another way to clog up the net, if you ask me!

Steven

[hellphish]

Steven, I too was quick to pass this off as Yet Another Aggregator. It actually looks like a way to automatically combine and filter data from multiple feeds. I'm looking at one of their examples right now. This particular pipe is for finding 'Apartments near something.'

It starts by asking for your location, a distance, and any query (lets say 'mc donalds') It does a craigslist search for the apartments, then it does a Yahoo Local search for mcdonalds in the specified location, then it compares the two lists and filters out apartments that aren't within %distance% of the mc donalds it found.

It looks like a pretty slick way to do some advanced queries, but looks like it will take a fair amount of development experience to actually do anything beyond basic feed aggregation.