A while ago, I blogged about Dapper – a web tool to create structured, machine readable data from Web sites. Yahoo have just announced the arrival of Pipes, which allows Joe Average to create new web services by joining together existing feeds, search engine queries etc. It’s very cool, hard to explain in words but easy to see – check out this example, which searches a bunch of different places for stuff about Shrewsbury Council
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Thanks, this is fascinating. If only my brain could get itself round the possibilities… Do you ever get the feeling that you just know something’s useful, but just can’t put your finger on exactly how? It’s going to be one of these things that will click in the shower, I think!
Like David, I have been wondering if the easy to use interface (pipe-builder) would ever make sense to me in more than a hyperthetical way?
I had saved an email with the link to O’Reilly’s blog notice celebrating the launch of Yahoo Pipes, but did not know who to send it to? Anyway – hopefully it will back you up in your enthusiasm?
Hi Jeremy. I haven’t revisited Pipes since my first post, to be honest. But just now I had another play, and came up with this pipe. It runs a search on the contents of all the rss feeds coming out of all the blogs in scotedublogs.org.uk.
Does that seem useful at all David? I’m not sure myself!