A novice wrestles with Yahoo Pipes

By Larry Dignan February 8, 2007, 12:37 AM PST

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Yahoo Pipes invites me in

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.

Create a pipe: Why not?

After a few clicks–and a few errors–Yahoo Pipes asks me if I want to create a Pipe. Sure why not?

Slow going...

So now what? Things are a bit slow. I want instant gratification.

Handy helper

Ah an little helper appears. Lovely.

Pop ups along the way

Now I’m on my way. Little pop-up helpers walk me through.

Aggregating components

Ok, now I have my components (still not completely sure what I’m doing though).

Picking data sources

The general idea is I want to search for all tech news and monitor Techmeme and ZDNet’s blogs.

Doh!

Well I thought I was on the right path (all I really wanted to do is draw the pipes together anyway). Error time.

Another attempt

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.

Trying again

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.

Where is that manual?

I give up. Maybe I should have read the directions (that mistake again).

Novice or idiot? Do not answer that.

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.

By Larry Dignan

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

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