Pipes by Yahoo!2 minute read

I think Yahoo! Pipes is one of the most revolutionary applications of the internet since the world wide web was invented in 1993.

I’ve had a bash – and failed miserably – but the way I can see this thing developing is just so amazingly powerful. Here’s just some really dumb, topline and basic ideas:

• PIPE: send me a text message/email saying “Take an umbrella today” if the forecast on the BOM website predicts rain
• PIPE: scour the thousands of photo websites in the world and bring up hi-res pictures of “London” + “bombings”
• PIPE: find all references to the word “Juventus” in any language on major news sites around the world, translate them into English and send them to me
• PIPE: if the keyword “Costello” appears in any of the following shows, save the transcripts from A Current Affair, 60 Minutes, AM, PM and The World Today websites and send them to my inbox on a weekly basis
• PIPE: scour all the social networking websites such as MySpace, bebo, Flickr, etc for phrases such as “Microsoft” + “sucks” and send me the results
• PIPE: Get pricing feeds from Amazon.com, Borders.com, etc and notify me when books about Military History are discounted by more than 60%. Or search for an item on ebay within a particular price range, with the results automatically sent to you: http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.info?_id=avkEShi32xG_EF6KZVUMqA
• PIPE: Get the addresses of 7-Eleven stores, place the locations on Google maps, giving me a visual representation of their coverage
• PIPE: Looking to travel overseas? Enter the name of the place and it will find 10 of the most recent photos, blog posts and news articles on the place, including travel prices to get there from home from a travel website such as travel.com.au, Travelocity or zuji
• PIPE: Grab the URLs from a particular site and automatically save them to my Bookmarks feed on Netvibes

PIPES, whether the Yahoo version or an eventual Apple – widget based, easy to use, automated, rule based (or even artificial intelligence-based) mashup of RSS feeds version, WILL CHANGE THE WAY WE USE THE INTERNET.