My first Pipe… almost.
So, I spent a few minutes poking around Yahoo Pipes, I thought it’d be neat to create a Pipe that grabbed my feed and then did a technorati search to find who else was blogging about what I was blogging about. I was all excited, I came up with a great name for the pipe - check it out… “who else is blogging about what I am”!
My first impressions are very positive. It is very easy to build using their little blocks. The environment is surprisingly nice - easily letting you debug each step in your pipe. A lot of things happen automatically and connecting these little boxes with each other is surprisingly satisfying.
Sadly at this point there’s some problems. It’s kind of buggy - for example, I could never drop in a source module into a foreach module. It just wouldn’t work - I saw some others having the same problem in their discussion forums. Also, the tips - if you linger for too long over any of the module options in the left nav a nice window pops up with some explanation and a link to a demo. This is great except it’s slow to popup and slow to go away and sometimes it doesn’t go away. This is an annoying problem because while the text is up, you can’t reach the button that lets you create a new pipe. Grrr..
But the main problem for me and my pipe dream is that, it doesn’t like to flatten things out. What I needed was a way to take a feed, run it through their content analyzer and then take elements from each rss item that the analyzer spit out and flatten that out into a simple string. Then I could send that string to another url and get a nice feed! Simple, eh? But Yahoo doesn’t yet have a module that can do that, it doggedly wants to keep items as items.
Ultimately, I think this is a really great technology. As a first release, I think it has a lot of functionality and really enables people to do some interesting things. I suspect they’ll be releasing more modules soon - people have been talking about modules pipes - which, to me, implies that people also want the ability to pull individual elements from the items and hopefully flatten them down.
Another several bonus points for Yahoo is that they didn’t release this as a beta project. It’s not without some minor bugs, but this looks full featured if slightly too limited. I’m looking forward to seeing how this progresses.
