For a couple of months now I’ve been playing with and trying to understand Yahoo Pipes. I’ve still got a lot to learn, but at least now I think I have enough understanding to write about it.
In its most basic form, Yahoo Pipes is a feed aggregator. You can take any RSS feed and view the output. If there happens to be geographic data in the feed, it will automatically parse that information and display it on a map. However, Pipes takes it a step further by providing tools for combining feeds from various sources, analyzing feeds for keywords or location data, or allowing users to input or control parameters for various feeds. For example, you could set up a Pipe to return RSS items from Craig’s List that shows red couches for sale within 30 miles of Greenville. In a stunning example of cooperation, Yahoo even plays nice with their rival, Google, and provides a link to a Google Earth KML output for any geocoded data.
Some of the most interesting items are the mash-ups that can be created. For example, one Pipe takes the feed from Reuters, parses it through the geonames.org RSS-to-geoRSS webservice, then displays the news items on a map. Another will takes the feed from the NY Times, analyzes it for key words, takes that output and uses it to find corresponding photographs in Flickr.