In a much better naming than Technorati’s immature WTF (Where’s the fire), Yahoo today released a labs product called Yahoo Pipes. The name comes from linux file handle terminology:

Pipes is a hosted service that lets you remix feeds and create new data mashups in a visual programming environment. The name of the service pays tribute to Unix pipes, which let programmers do astonishingly clever things by making it easy to chain simple utilities together on the command line.

The idea is quite simple. Yahoo Pipes lets users take everyday RSS feeds and mash them together with Yahoo APIs, other feeds, and programmatic building blocks in an easy to use graphical environment. Unfortunately, the execution is terrible and buggy. Take, for example, this yahoo pipe I created to scan the NYT feed for locations / keywords and insert flickr images as appropriate:

The first thing you might notice is that it doesn’t really do what it’s supposed to. Well, we’ll come to that in a minute. You’ll also notice a lot of & going around–every time I hit save it re-encoded the original ampersand. How irritating. Worse is how their pipes are so watered down they can’t do anything:

All I wanted to do was take some content, for each item do content analysis and geo analysis, and use those outputs as the input to a flickr search, then append the photo to the text snippet. Well, first you can’t fork a data stream into two bits and recombine them later. So scratch two kinds of analysis. Second, the outputs of content/geo analysis can’t be used to populate the inputs of the flickr data source–an obvious problem. And third, the annotation feature useless doesn’t annotate, it just replaces chunks messily.

Yahoo, your pipes are indeed clogged.

One Response to “Yahoo’s PIPE api”

1. Rosanna Costa says:

   2/4/2009 at 1:06 am

   nice article! nice site. you're in my rss feed now
   keep it up

   Reply