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Yahoo! Pipes: web feed mixing service

It lets one easily combine diverse web feeds

THIS EDITION of NetSpeak explores the features of Yahoo! Pipes, the web feed mixing service, launched by Yahoo!

The concept of obtaining data/content from multiple web sites and combining it into a meaningful product/service always triggers the imagination of web developers.

As mentioned in an earlier column, such applications, involved in collecting data from different web sources, are generally known as mashups (http://www.hindu.com/biz/2006/10/30/stories/200 6103000651500. htm).

The disruptive nature of this facility is quite evident given the proliferation of a variety of tools meant for mixing different services. Yahoo! Pipes, the latest service from Yahoo! that helps you easily combine diverse web feeds, is yet another tool in this genre.

We subscribe to several web feeds to obtain the latest information on a subject. As you would already know, most of the search services provide search web feeds also along with the search output. For instance, if you are tracking the latest developments on a subject, say "outsourcing," you can invoke a search on Google News and obtain a search feed alongside results. Now, you can subscribe to this search feed and continue receiving new alerts on this subject from your newsreader - this keeps you from repeating the search. Of course, besides Google news, one might be looking at other news sources as well. These services also provide search feeds and you can subscribe to them as well.

So, now you have several feeds at your disposal to track your favourite subject. But many of the items on these feeds could contain the same news stories. Naturally, one needs a solution to weed out the unnecessary ones. A solution that combines these feeds, eliminates the duplicate ones and arranges the rest in chronological order would be ideal. Of course, for a skilled programmer, this may not be an issue. Yahoo! Pipes (http://pipes.yahoo.com/) is an attempt to help ordinary netizens also do such tasks independently.

In the computing world, a `pipe' can be considered as a software device that helps you redirect the output of one program to the input of another.

Those of you who are familiar with UNIX/Linux systems or the old DOS command line environment could be familiar with the concept of pipes and the pipe symbol. A pipe generally lets you intelligently combine several programs in a chain to accomplish a function. For instance, the command `Dir' displays the files in a folder and the `Find' command can be used to display the lines in a file that contain a specified string.

By combining these commands with the pipe tool, we can spot files created on a specific date (example: to display files created on `02/15/07' use the command: `dir | find "02/15/2007" ').

Yahoo! Pipes takes this concept further by providing a set of modules/tools with a graphical interface for easily combining several news feeds in suitable ways.

Also, you can publish/share your pipes with others. The program's infrastructure provides tools for entering data, fetching feeds, sorting feed items according to different criteria and so on.

J. MURALI

email: jmurali@gmail.com

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