By : Nidhi Gupta

Yahoo Pipes, to date, seems one of those unsung tools that could really be useful, especially to SEOs. Pipes is a free online service that lets you remix popular feed types and create data mashups using a visual editor. You can use Pipes to run your own web projects, or publish and share your own web services without ever having to write a line of code.

Uses of Yahoo Pipes:

1. Aggregate multiple related web feeds.
2. Filter for desired topics.
3. Sort multiple feeds by date, to aid in detecting temporal trends (topics).
4. Sort by keywords in feed item titles.
5. Sort by member who submitted the story, in the case of social bookmarking sites.

Building a Pipe

You can make a Pipe by dragging pre-configured modules onto a canvas and wiring them together in the Pipes Editor.

Each Pipe consists of two or more modules, each of which performs a single, specific task. For example, the Fetch module will retrieve a feed URL, while the Sort module will re-order a feed based on criteria you provide.

Each module has one or more terminals, represented by small circles in the interface. You can wire modules together by clicking on one module’s output terminal and dragging the wire to another module’s input terminal. Once the terminals are wired together the output from the first module will serve as input to the second module.

In addition to data feeds, Pipes also lets you add user input fields into your Pipe. These show up at runtime as form fields that users of your Pipe can fill in.

Sharing a Pipe

Once you’ve built a Pipe, you’ll be able save it on Yahoo’s server and then call it like you would any other feed. Pipes offers output in RSS 2.0, RSS 1.0 (RDF), JSON and Atom formats for maximum flexibility. You can also choose to publish your Pipe and share it with the world, allowing other users to clone it, add their own improvements, or use it as a subcomponent in their own creations.

Hosted Pipes

A Hosted Pipe is a web-based interface that Pipes provides which allows you to execute a Pipe that you or someone else has built and published. It’s a useful mechanism for quickly determining what type of content a Pipe outputs. It is also a jumping off point for subscribing to a Pipe in your favorite feed reader, viewing how the Pipe was constructed, or cloning it so that you can further tweak it yourself.

“Publishing” a Pipe

Publishing a Pipe enables the Pipe to be searched, or seen, by others on pipes.yahoo.com. It will appear in the browse page, your Pipes page, and as a search result to anyone on the site.

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