Yahoo! Pipes!

[Homeboy]

It takes effort to explain the significance of a new product when the immediate benefit to consumers may not be so obvious, and the awkwardly named “pipes� from Yahoo! is no exception. The product name is taken from the world of UNIX where a pipe is a conduit for the transfer of data between applications, while with the Yahoo product it is a conduit for data between web services. In a basic form Yahoo! Pipes allows you to take data from one or more sources and to bring it together, for example - to aggregate a group of feeds.

But Yahoo! Pipes goes beyond what just pipes are and what pipes do though as the application provides functions (or as they are called in the app - modules) that will perform a variety of different actions. There are modules available to prompt the user for input (a variety of input types), different operators to count, loop, cut, count, sort and merge data along with a variety of string and date functions. Because of this already broad base of available functions, Yahoo! Pipes is more akin to a shell scripting environment for the web rather than just a simple conduit between applications. It works like a visual procedural programming language with the output of the process dropping out at the bottom, in the form of text output, RSS, SMS alerts of even JSON. You can use feeds, user input or other pipes as input.

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Yahoo! pipes