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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8 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.
I fiddled around with Pipes a bit and made a feed for news related to what I’m majoring in at school, web design. Keeping up on information in this industry is essential to success so I figured it’d be a great use of Yahoo Pipes to create a RSS feed related to the information I need.
It worked -very- well, but I’m struggling with figuring out how to take the RSS feed generated by Pipes and bring it into my wordpress blog as an actual feed with title captions. Looking around on the net it seems I’m not the only one having trouble with this. Do you know anyone who might have figured this out?
The point of this is to give you something to read, not fill your blog up. There are ways to do that, and it involves taking the feed and adding it to the feed widget in WordPress.com, but please don’t clutter up your blog with other people’s content in the content area. We want to read you, not someone else on your blog. 😀
Fair enough, though the reason my blog references other resources heavily is because it is required for my class assignments to refer to at least three sources (if not more) for every post I create.
Were it simply a personal blog for me to speak my mind I wouldn’t bother. 🙂
Thank you for the answer, my goal was simply to have the RSS feed kick off the last 5-10 topics in a sidebar for convenience, not for regurgitation in my own posts.
Unfortunately, it seems the wordpress feed widget really doesn’t like the yahoo pipes feeds…
Sorry that it doesn’t like Yahoo Pipes feed. Have you tried the Yahoo Pipes Social Media Fire Hose? I’ve had some success with that feed, but it’s been a while. I understand that your class assignments require references and sources, but those are probably required to be inside of your blog post content, related to that blog content, and not brought in via feed in the sidebar. Let me know what you find out!
Ah thank you! I learned something new by looking at that app. I didn’t understand what you meant in your first post, but yeah that wasn’t my intention. Just to add a little flavor to my blog, and to give myself an easy resource feed as well as my readers. You can check it out to see how it looks, I’m still trying to figure out how to make it display newest first. I’ll get there 🙂