Pipin' Hot!

I'm obviously a big fan of Google (except for a few things here and there), and there are some projects of theirs, such as GoogleMashups and Jaiku, whose public launches I eagerly await. [ Hey Google, how about some dev accounts, huh? ;-) ] **

Meanwhile, I'm not one for thumb-twiddling, so I look around. Thus, I'm on Twitter and Yahoo! Pipes.

Yahoo! Pipes is simply fascinating, and I regret that I only started playing around with it over a year after its launch. If Google ever considered purchasing Yahoo!, Pipes was likely on its list of Pros.

The concept behind Yahoo! Pipes is simple: you stitch together various elements and transform data as it travels from one end to another. All this is done via a neat AJAX interface.

From the site:

Pipes is a powerful composition tool to aggregate, manipulate, and mashup content from around the web.

Like Unix pipes, simple commands can be combined together to create output that meets your needs.

I started on Pipes by combining Twitter JSON feeds and RSS from Prologue-themed WordPress sites, e.g. psyku.tk. It was a pretty interesting exercise, and you can see the results in my "Twitter + psy//ku" widget box.

Here's a snapshot of one of my pipes in the editor:



I'm sure I'll be working on more pipes as time allows. Check them out at pipes.yahoo.com/ibrado.

** Feb 26. I now have Mashups access.