Dec
24
Playing around with Yahoo Pipes
Posted by: Jens | December 24, 2011 | Leave a Comment
For years I had planned to explore Yahoo Pipes. It looks incredibly promising, but as so often I have not come around to spend much time with the tool. Today I intend to change this. Let’s build our first few pipes for UBC.
What are Pipes?
Essentially, Yahoo Pipes allows you to build data mashups in a graphial interface without any programming knowledge. It can work with a variety of source data, take user input, perform operations such as sorting, filtering etc. and output the new data in several different output formats, including badges or feeds (RSS, JSON, XML).
Example 1: news aggregation
Let’s start with a typical use case: news aggregation. UBC has a huge number of staff/units that publish news releases, but no single frontend to consume all this data. Let’s see what Yahoo Pipes can do about this. In this example I simply used the fetch feed option and added news feeds from Law, Science, Graduate Studies and Public Affairs. Then I used the unique operator to get rid of duplicates and sort all items by publication date. Within a few minutes I get a badge to display the latest UBC news from a selected number of sources, see below.
It would be really interesting to evaluate if we could feed an XML file of UBC RSS news feeds into the pipe to then fetch all items of each feed, clean it up (remove duplicates, sort) and publish it. This would create a comprehensive and easy to manage news network which we could push into services such as Yahoo or Google News. The only challenge would be to collect and update all the incoming feeds.
Combined with a filter operator, we could create custom feeds around certain topics such as health or medicine related. In another post I will discuss the opportunities UBC could utilize with a few custom taxonomies (research area, campus location, country, audience etc.) that could be applied to news, videos, images and so on and would work really nicely with something like this for the filtering. Possibilities = endless.
Example 2: Translations
Let’s use a similar approach and add an automatic translation from the feed items. I added two loops and the translation string operator into this pipe. Unfortunately, there seem to be a couple of issues to embed multiple pipes in a single post and the feed shortcode does not seem to be enabled. However, you can still view the result of the pipe on the Yahoo website. Granted, the result is rather hilarious due to the bad translation, but as a proof of concept this works.
Example 3: Video aggregation
Let’s try another aggregation use case with videos. UBC has multiple YouTube channels and again not a single frontend for users to enjoy all our videos. With Yahoo Pipes this can be fixed within a few minutes.
However, the number of incoming feeds seems limited to 10 so that we cannot incorporate all the existing UBC channels… too bad.
I am sure within the last hour of playing around with Pipes I only scratched the surface. Many tutorials show great and more complex examples of combining various sources, adding maps, allowing user input etc. to create great value added pipes based on existing content.
Conclusion
I think Yahoo Pipes is a powerful tool and its attractiveness is that not much programming knowledge is required to build valuable outputs. I do not see it as a major tool for development of services at UBC because most of the examples on this page can be build with existing, more powerful tools, e.g. Drupal and WordPress. Both CMS include modules/plugins for feed processing. Especially Drupal will exceed with the Feeds module in combination with CCK and Views to build great aggregation sites, including commenting and voting on the content. However, I can think of a couple of scenarios where Yahoo Pipes could be very helpful:
- It allows our audiences to create cool mashups. If UBC does not offer desired frontends, but does provide the data in a usable format, anybody can build something with Pipes on top of it. It could range from a blogger who wants to display UBC content with specific keyword tags in a sidebar to someone building a custom search allowing user input to find building locations or similar. The power lies with the user and they do not have to wait for UBC to provide a service.
- Development with Pipes is really quick and it could serve as interim solution for a couple of needed services.
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