Examples of Yahoo! Pipes in Action to Wet Your Appetite

Yahoo! Pipes is finally back online, and it's certainly something to fall in love with instantly.

I've always been a supporter of NewsMastering for business intelligence and enriching your website, but Pipes simply brings this concept to a whole new level.

The small applications it creates for you can be easily used by any end-user, while the actual "creation" interface still leaves much to be desired. While the interface is relatively easy to grasp and use, and especially powerful, it is not something for people without at least some relational database logic/experience.

Will it be used by end-users to create new content streams on a mass level? Most certainly not. And if the bloggers are calling this a victory for Yahoo!, finally beating Google at being first at something, the entire concept is really waiting here for someone with Google's muscle to take it and make it more user friendly.

But that's not really the point right now. To really understand the power of this service, it's enough to test just a few of the different pipes its users have been creating yesterday.

Here's a quick selection to wet your appetite. To see how they work just click on the pipe name.

Merging all the Official Yahoo! Blogs
Let's start with a simple one. This pipe combines all the official Yahoo! blogs, by tapping into their RSS feeds, and creates a new combined stream of content featuring the latest posts in all of the blogs. This is as basic as it gets, simply combining multiple content sources, without applying any kind of advanced filtering.

Hedge Fund News
This pipe really nicely demonstrates the 101 concept of NewsMastering, tapping into various content sources to bring you the latest news on hedge funds. Either subscribe to the output with your RSS Reader to be constantly updates on latest hedge news, or display this content on your website to enrich it for your visitors and the search engines.

Aggregated News Alerts
Various news engines, like Google News, Yahoo! News, Technorati and others either search through different sections of the internet, or provide different results due to how they capture and rank the content. Using this pipe you can tap into all of them at the same time, performing a keyword search for the latest news and getting the results from all of the sources in a single stream of content.

Latest Blog Mentions Search
This pipe will allow you to search for a keyword in the latest blog mentions around the blogosphere.

Apartment Near Something
Want to find an appartment near a certain location, like the park, opera or similar? This pipe lets you specify which location you would like to find an appartment near, minimum distance from location and the city you're interested in. The pipe gets its content from a single source list, but manipulates the data to help you better reach your objective.

eBay Price Watch
Want to watch a product at eBay, above and under a certain point? With this pipe you can.

Example: Using the Babelfish Module
Yahoo! Pipes is not only about taking existing content and remixing it. This example shows how you can tap into the Bablefish translation service to automatically translate the output you just created to any language supported by the service. My experience with Bablefish's translation accuracy isn't exactly favorable, but it's a good demonstration of the things you can do with Pipes.

Two more things:)

• Thanks to Marjolein Hoekstra of CleverClogs for the pointer. I was so busy with other stuff that I totally missed all the "hype" that was going on around Yahoo! Pipes. Thanks Marjolein!
• Robin Good just did an extensive analysis of Yahoo! Pipes.