Derek van Vliet of the Blog Herald offers Killer Pipes for Social News Feeds, an amazing look the high customization of multiple feeds possible with Yahoo’s new Pipes service.
A couple of weeks ago, Yahoo! launched Pipes, a GUI that makes remixing and mashing up RSS feeds fun and easy to do. Since Pipes uses RSS data for input and output right now, the applications for social news are limited by the RSS features of the sites. The more RSS features they have, the more you can do with them in Pipes. That being said, there are a number of ways you can use Pipes to streamline your social news RSS subscriptions.
You can mix, mash, combine, and reduce a variety of feeds from various social bookmarking and networking sources to get the news you can use, even by specific topics and keywords.
I’m going to poke into this to see how I can increase my feed coverage of specific items and eliminate all of the feed nonsense I seem to get right now.
Have you used this? Is it working for you? Have you come up with some interesting customized feeds with this? Share!
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Copyright Lorelle VanFossen, member of the 9Rules Network 
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3 Comments
Hi Lorelle,
Yes its kind of fun and cool! I have just created one pipe with Indian Techie Blogs. I aim to create a network of Indian Techie Blogs with this. I have similiar ideas in the ‘pipe’line
http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/3uQ4sK_82xGXVwWZJjBjOg/run?_render=rss
-Calling all Indian Tech Bloggers to contact me via the Contact Form at my blog -
One of the best uses for Pipes I have come up with so far is as a filter to a community feed aggregator focused on China-related blogs, called Chinalyst. Chinalyst is useful to me because it has a Recently Popular feature. However, I already subscribe to about 50 China blogs via my feedreader and many of these same blogs appear in Chinalyst too. Using Yahoo Pipes I can filter out the items in the Recently Popular feed that I am already subscribed to and therefore have either already read or will read, and just focus on popular content that I would otherwise not be aware of.
A powerful use of Pipes that I can think of is to use it to manipulate the content of feeds, rather than just the feeds themselves. Unfortunately, this is not a current feature of Pipes, and perhaps never will be, as it would mean that Yahoo would have to pay a lot more for storage since content would need to be stored, at least temporarily, on their servers in addition to feed URLs and sets of rules.
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