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Yahoo!’s Pipes — The universal mash-up engine

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logo_1.gifToday I’ve been eagerly waiting to get into Pipes, Yahoo!’s most excellent-sounding universal mashup engine — and so has everyone else, as it’s been down ever since I heard about it on TechCrunch. (Maybe it’s because Tim O’Reilly called it “a milestone in the history of the internet.”:-)

As I haven’t actually had a chance to play with Pipes, I’m not going to describe what it is, instead leaving that to these two great examples (one and two) by Kevin Cheng.

I don’t think Tim O’Reilly is dabbling in hyperbole. For neogeographers in particular this will be something of a big bang, I suspect.

How? For starters, Kevin Cheng’s examples output GeoRSS by default, and the entire “pipe” is geospatially enabled.

Second, KML support is coming! From Yahoo! ! Check this out:

While Pipes today lets users mix data from RSS and Atom feeds, Yahoo hopes to extend the service to support other data formats, Web services, processing modules and output renderings, Yahoo said. For example, Yahoo will open up access to the Pipes engine to programmers and add support for the KML data source, which is used to display geographic data in Google’s popular Google Earth mapping application and Google Maps website.

Start combining this with the power of the network link and we’re suddenly at a whole new level of mashing — where decision engines, inputs and formatting are all turned into interchangeable web services. This is much more than what XSLT stylesheets can do to XML.

I can’t wait to see what GIS pros and amateurs come up with:-)

2 thoughts on “Yahoo!’s Pipes — The universal mash-up engine”

  2. I came across your post on Pipes while reading up about it and looking for some tutorials. Wanted to let you know what I ended up coming up with. After spending a decent amount of time messing around – I built a feed that adds mapping information (latitude and longitude) details to a Craigslist apartment search. The pipes “Locator” operator is pretty awesome! Then I took the feed & integrated it with Proto (a mashup building tool) and built a Craigslist apt-finding tools that hunts, tracks and analyzes listings. I created a 5 min. video on my website http://www.protosw.com to show how it works. You can also download the tool for free from there if you want to play with it. Hope you like it! If you check it out, let me know what you think.

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