Yahoo Pipes via Dan Dube dot Com

There is nothing cooler than discovering you can take a feed from one bit of RSS and plug it into another service and slowly create your own custom feeds based on simple keyword filters. But that service is here today using the mechanism of ‘pipes’ ala Unix style input/output of character streams from one application into another. Take for instance in Unix the ability list the contents of a folder in a long detailed format:

ls -al

Now what good is that if there’s a thousand files that get spit back in your face? Now add the power of Unix pipes, and the search command known as ‘grep’

ls -al | grep interestingThings*.txt

So now I can take the output of the first command and rather than send that output directly to my computer screen, I ‘pipe’ i t over to the grep command and let it do a search in real time on all that text output. I get a list of things as a result:

interestingThings1.txt
interestingThingsFoo.txt
etc.

So Yahoo Pipes extends this metaphor into the real of http and rss/xml feeds of data from Twitter, Blogs, Web based RSS news readers and allows you to find stuff as soon as it is sent out for mass consumption on the Interwebs. And like all things, it also allows you to add your own personal spin by blogging about that which you have discovered through the Yahoo Pipes. Flame On!

For example, suppose I wanted to search for news on Google, specifically about Chrome. There could be useful things popping up at any minute, and I could easily miss them (like leaked screenshots!) This is what you could consider doing:

* Create a twitter search for #google

* Subscribe to the RSS feed of that search

* Send the RSS feed to the pipes, where it is filtered for the word “chrome”

* Subscribe to the RSS feed that comes out of the pipes

Now you can monitor any breaking developments about chrome as they happen (more or less)!

This is the real power of the web 2.0 stuff, the ability to make your own stuff. No longer will we have to rely on any one place to get info. I am using twitter, google, and yahoo to get my information here!

via Yahoo Pipes.