Yahoo! Pipes is impressive

Posted on Thursday, February 08, 2007 @ 14:07 CET

If you haven't yet you should check out the new Yahoo! Pipes.

This "visual programming environment" is similar to what you find in Quartz Composer or Shake (except its done in JavaScript which is impressive in itself) and allows even non-programers to mashup feeds and other data for their own uses. The output is shown on the page itself, but you can also pull it into your own web-app via RSS and JSON. This thing has tons of potential and props to Yahoo! for what could be a massively popular service.

Within minutes I created a simple pipe that reads in an RSS feed, sorts it by the publish date and spits it out again. To see how it was made, click on the little "view/edit" image. If you run it you'll see the output and at the bottom of the page are links to get the raw RSS or JSON data. Very cool.

Now for my wishlist:

1. Documentation. Granted, they've just launched so this is coming soon
2. crossdomain.xml. In order for Flash/Flex apps to load data from a domain other than the one they're on, there needs to be a crossdomain.xml on the root of that domain that allows access from other domains. If this was in place you take any pipes' output and use it within Flash/Flex. This is a must have! Vote for it on the suggestion board
3. OPML input. Currently only RSS is supported, but an OPML input to a fetch module would be awesome. Vote for it on the suggestion board

[Via TechCrunch and O'Reilly Radar]

- paulo

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