It’s Not A Truck

I’ve just started playing with Yahoo Pipes. Amazing — it’s one of those technologies that makes complicated things simple and expands what we can do with data on the Web.

In a nutshell: Yahoo Pipes is a visual programming environment for feeds. It allows you to combine user input with feeds of your choosing and massage the data in a lot of interesting ways.

I’ve still got a lot to learn about how it works before I can make anything really useful, but I was able to throw together a quick example in just a couple of minutes. Inspired by Jeremy Keith’s life stream, I built my own life stream Pipe that combines the various feeds I publish. That Pipe can then output my combined feed as JSON or RSS so that, potentially, it could be fed into some other interesting application. Want to subscribe to my life stream? You can.