Raymond Camden's ColdFusion Blog: Yahoo is now officially the cool kid on the blog

Yahoo is now officially the cool kid on the blog

I've blogged quite a bit about how happy I've been with the Yahoo APIs (although I can say that they don't seem to respond to bugs well - I found a bug that was reported, and acknowledged, by Yahoo a year ago that still hasn't been fixed), especially in comparison to Google. Today I discovered Yahoo Pipes. Yahoo Pipes is a graphical tool that lets you build complex mashups between various RSS services. The tool is absolutely amazing and you have to give it a try.

In about five minutes I built a pipe that joined the RSS feed of MXNA and Joystiq and sorted them by date. You can view the RSS feed here:

http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/SLVtsZ3C2xGyEsVlZoQMOQ/run?_render=rss

The tool allows for some pretty complex mashups. You can filter, accept user input, sort, etc. Check it out.

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 22, 2007 at 11:59 AM. It was filed in the following categories: Development. It has been viewed 4,939 times and has 7 comments.

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Comment 1 written by Dan on 22 February 2007, at 12:22 PM

I wonder what they're using to power that graphical interface. Is it Flash/Flex or did they really take the time to create that in Javascript?

Anyway, it's potentially a great tool, but as it'll take me a couple days to think up a good RSS Mashup idea to prove that. ;-) Thanks for pointing it out.
Comment 2 written by Joe mastroianni on 22 February 2007, at 12:31 PM

Well if it's flash/flex they got rid of the telltale 'About Flash Player 9' item in the right click menu. I would assume they're using their Yahoo ajax toolkit or whatever it's called.
Comment 3 written by Dan on 22 February 2007, at 12:36 PM

@Joe: A quick check of the source looks like it's using the YUI Javascript API. I've seen most of the UI components on other Yahoo sites, but the combined result in this case is pretty dang slick.
Comment 4 written by Joe Mastroianni on 22 February 2007, at 12:42 PM

@Dan: Oh I fully agree. Very cool interface. Just goes to show that even with all the talk about Flex you can still do some pretty cool stuff with JS.
Comment 5 written by Brian Rinaldi on 22 February 2007, at 1:34 PM

Hey Ray, you inspired me to make a mashup of my own. http://www.remotesynthesis.com/blog/index.cfm/2007...
Comment 6 written by Brian Swartzfager on 23 February 2007, at 7:02 AM

I created a pipe to look for articles on Adobe, CF, Flex, and Apollo on general tech news sites:

http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/1iO5c1y92xGRVJoAlvXiA...

Unfortunately, either I haven't designed the pipe very well or I'm not pulling in feeds from the best sites, because the results are usually sparse.

Have you checked out Adobe's take on this technique, myFeedz (http:\\www.myfeedz.com)? myFeedz lets you pull in articles based on tags, and you can save the articles it finds for later reading.
Comment 7 written by Brian Swartzfager on 23 February 2007, at 7:03 AM

Oops, reversed the slashes on that URL...must not have enough caffeine in me yet:

http://www.myfeedz.com