Yahoo Pipes is feed aggregator that lets you mix and match RSS feeds. According to the early reviews, the big advance is that Yahoo Pipes has a user interface that even novices–that would be me–can follow. The first screen looks easy enough. Maybe I’ll become Mr. RSS-mixer too. Here’s a walkthrough.
After a few clicks–and a few errors–Yahoo Pipes asks me if I want to create a Pipe. Sure why not?
So now what? Things are a bit slow. I want instant gratification.
Ah an little helper appears. Lovely.
Now I’m on my way. Little pop-up helpers walk me through.
Ok, now I have my components (still not completely sure what I’m doing though).
The general idea is I want to search for all tech news and monitor Techmeme and ZDNet’s blogs.
Well I thought I was on the right path (all I really wanted to do is draw the pipes together anyway). Error time.
So I swap a few URLs. This time of RSS feeds. Still can’t get these pipes to connect. Again that’s all I want to do anyway.
Back to the drawing board. I try some of the basic sources. Google Base and Yahoo Search for instance. The good news: I did connect a pipe. Communication failures abound.
I give up. Maybe I should have read the directions (that mistake again).
I click Ok and this is what I get. In summary: I don’t know what I’m doing because I’m a novice or idiot. (I prefer the former.) I’ll leave the Web revolution to someone else.
Larry Dignan is Editor in Chief at Celonis. He was most recently Vice President, Editorial and Editor in Chief at ZDNet. Prior to that he was executive news editor at eWeek and news editor at Baseline. He also served as the East Coast news editor and finance editor at CNET News.com. Larry has covered the technology industry since 1995, publishing articles in WallStreetWeek.com, Inter@ctive Week, and The New York Times. He's a graduate of the Columbia School of Journalism and the University of Delaware.
