Yahoo is now officially the cool kid on the blog

I've blogged quite a bit about how happy I've been with the Yahoo APIs (although I can say that they don't seem to respond to bugs well - I found a bug that was reported, and acknowledged, by Yahoo a year ago that still hasn't been fixed), especially in comparison to Google. Today I discovered Yahoo Pipes. Yahoo Pipes is a graphical tool that lets you build complex mashups between various RSS services. The tool is absolutely amazing and you have to give it a try.

In about five minutes I built a pipe that joined the RSS feed of MXNA and Joystiq and sorted them by date. You can view the RSS feed here:

http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/SLVtsZ3C2xGyEsVlZoQMOQ/run?_render=rss

The tool allows for some pretty complex mashups. You can filter, accept user input, sort, etc. Check it out.

Comments (7) Feb 22, 2007 11:59 AM Views: 3797

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I wonder what they're using to power that graphical interface. Is it Flash/Flex or did they really take the time to create that in Javascript?

Anyway, it's potentially a great tool, but as it'll take me a couple days to think up a good RSS Mashup idea to prove that. ;-) Thanks for pointing it out.
# Posted By Dan | 2/22/07 12:22 PM
Well if it's flash/flex they got rid of the telltale 'About Flash Player 9' item in the right click menu. I would assume they're using their Yahoo ajax toolkit or whatever it's called.
# Posted By Joe mastroianni | 2/22/07 12:31 PM
@Joe: A quick check of the source looks like it's using the YUI Javascript API. I've seen most of the UI components on other Yahoo sites, but the combined result in this case is pretty dang slick.
# Posted By Dan | 2/22/07 12:36 PM
@Dan: Oh I fully agree. Very cool interface. Just goes to show that even with all the talk about Flex you can still do some pretty cool stuff with JS.
# Posted By Joe Mastroianni | 2/22/07 12:42 PM
Hey Ray, you inspired me to make a mashup of my own. http://www.remotesynthesis.com/blog/index.cfm/2007...
# Posted By Brian Rinaldi | 2/22/07 1:34 PM
I created a pipe to look for articles on Adobe, CF, Flex, and Apollo on general tech news sites:

http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/1iO5c1y92xGRVJoAlvXiA...

Unfortunately, either I haven't designed the pipe very well or I'm not pulling in feeds from the best sites, because the results are usually sparse.

Have you checked out Adobe's take on this technique, myFeedz (http:\\www.myfeedz.com)? myFeedz lets you pull in articles based on tags, and you can save the articles it finds for later reading.
# Posted By Brian Swartzfager | 2/23/07 7:02 AM
Oops, reversed the slashes on that URL...must not have enough caffeine in me yet:

http://www.myfeedz.com
# Posted By Brian Swartzfager | 2/23/07 7:03 AM
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