Yahoo Pipes

February 12th, 2007

Yahoo Pipes, the new RSS remix and mashup programming environment from Yahoo has made a stunning debut. I’ve used Ray Ozzie’s quote “RSS is the Unix Pipe of the Internet” in my presentations on GeoRSS, and Pipes is a big step towards realizing that idea .. this kind of leveraging of RSS is exactly the reason why it’s a good idea to package up geography in GeoRSS.

And GeoRSS is pretty central to the new service. O’Reilly’s Brady Forrest deconstructs a location based pipe. Chris Schmidt has added GeoRSS output to MetaCarta Web Services to integrate with the Pipes system.

I’ve made some experiments with Pipes, and reported them on my weblog. There are still a lot of rough patches, see the section on GeoRSS in my blog post for some specific bugs and gotchas. But it’s a promising start and the developers seem to be listening closely to feedback, so feel encouraged to have a try.

Posted by mikel Filed in General

2 Responses to “Yahoo Pipes”

  1. Christopher Schmidt Says:
    February 12th, 2007 at 9:32 am

    Note that I added the support only against my will: The problem is that the content that I have is a bad fit for RSS. For example: Atom requires an updated date. The content that I have is not something that I have an updated date for: this data is not a ‘running commentary’ style content. They’re search results. RSS to describe a set of non-changing search results doesn’t make sense. (This is different from something like ‘news search’, which would have an updated date.)

    RSS2 is a mess, RSS1 is 5 years old and shows it. So, the way forward is Atom — and Atom demonstrates the way in which it is not the right format for delivering Search Result content.

    GeoRSS is not a great match for all data. KML works much better here, and has the same level of simplicity, with the added benefit of being supported much more firmly in the enterprise.

    Providing GeoRSS output is a concession to the fact that there are interesting tools out there that want to consume it. That is a plus in its favor. It’s unfortunate that the syndication format that I would like to use the most makes using GeoRSS painful for the content that I have.

  2. Mikel Says:
    February 12th, 2007 at 10:48 am

    Well I think MetaCarta supporting GeoRSS is cool even if you don’t ;)

    GeoRSS is neutral on the appropriateness of RSS flavors. It’s designed for widest acceptance, and that’s reflected in all the “interesting tools” that support it.

    As far as the enterprise, you’ll see plenty of professional level tools with GeoRSS support, Safe Software just last week announced support.

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