Yahoo! Pipes
The web is buzzing about Yahoo! Pipes. It’ll be interesting to see what people build with Pipes. I couldn’t think of any need I had that would be fulfilled by Pipes, until today. I host this site on TextDrive / Joyent, and they have a forum that I lurk on from time to time. I’m mostly just interested in what a few select people say, particularly the top few people who work at TextDrive. Unfortunately on that forum, there aren’t any RSS feeds available that will monitor particular users’ posts. Until now, I’ve been using a bookmark to do a search on the forum that returns the latest posts from a specific user. In about 10 minutes of playing with Yahoo! Pipes, I had a working Pipe just to my liking. Hopefully, this does the trick for me.
I’m curious to see if I’ll “miss” posts by the select three users. The feed I’m filtering, contains the 15 most recent posts to the forum. This means that each post might not be listed in the feed for very long, as it may get pushed down by more recent posts. Presumably, either my RSS reader would have to access to Pipe or possibly Yahoo! Pipes would have to access the feed during that window in. If they don’t, then I’ll miss a post. It seems like this might be a problem for a significant number of uses for Yahoo! Pipes, so I’m interested to see how that plays out. Granted this “problem” is inherent in feeds, but it may be compounded when you’re filtering lots of feeds for specific information.
While we’re on the topic of working with feeds and publishing the results, it is worth noting you can do some simple manipulation and publishing with Google Reader, as well.