Yahoo! lays out the Pipes
A friend turned me onto Yahoo! Pipes last Friday where I played mad scientist for a few hours before finally getting the hang of it. It’s not very intuitive, and I’m not Einstein, although I have to say the drag and drop canvas is pretty cool. Yahoo’s Matt Martone says it’s still a little buggy, but a cool tool nevertheless.
What will Pipes do? Pipes will allow you to customize RSS feeds, so instead of just tapping into one feed, you can plug into many, add operators, truncate and much more.
So far I have plugged in the RSS feeds from the following sources, using specified queries, and then truncated the feed, which was pretty elementary.
JobCentral - of course
Simplyhired
Jobster.com
Indeed.com
and Google Base
Go to Yahoo! Pipes and search for the “Indy Sales Jobs” pipe, and then run it. This will serve up a mashup of the Indianapolis Sales Jobs from all of the above sources. Yes I know, this is a very crude example of mashing-up jobs from several sources, although it shows the start of RSS feed manipulation through Pipes. I’ve published this specific “Indy Sales Jobs” feed, making it available for others to add sources, operators, truncate better, or whatever.. At least try it out. This looks to become an incredible FREE mashup delivery system, and Pipes should be able to deliver every job from every source on the web for FREE to anyone.
Also check out Julian and O’Reilly Radar’s posts on Yahoo Pipes.
I was having some trouble with Pipes beta when it was first rolled out. Apparently, the interest in Pipes and traffic to the site was pretty significant to say the least. It’s working great for me now.
Coming soon, I’ll have some very real applications for Pipes in the online recruitment space.
Glad to see that you pointed to Tim O’Reilly’s post. For those who don’t know who Tim is, he coined the term, ‘Web 2.0.’
Check out his post. He says that Yahoo! Pipes is, ‘a milestone in the history of the Internet.’ That’s serious.
http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2007/02/pipes_and_filte.html