Love Them Pipes!

In reading my many RSS feeds today, there were numerous mentions of this new Yahoo service called Pipes.  It's a feed manipulator/aggregator made for users to create more narrowed feeds to what they want to see.

For those of you who are thinking "uh ... feeding what?  manipulate who?  RSS means uh ...?", I'll give you an explanation.

RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is a new-ish technology that is being used on news sites, blogs and the like, which allows the reader to subscribe to a syndication feed of the articles that are being published.  Think of subscribing to a couple newspapers and magazines.  Those newspapers and magazines are delivered daily, weekly or less, to your mailbox or front door.  Handy, wouldn't you say?  You don't have to go get one yourself, it's sent directly to you.  In comes RSS, it's a similar thing.  You use an application (there are many free ones out there to download if you search for "RSS feed reader") I use Google Reader, and subscribe to the url/address that is linked, typically with the icon .  From then on the feed reader application will automatically check for new articles and show them to you as unread.  Kind of like leaving your email application open all day where the new email is downloaded and waiting for you to be read. 

So what's the advantage to this?  Well, you get very very regular updates of news throughout the day (rather than waiting the day or week or month for that newspaper) and can subscribe to as many as you like.  Pretty much all of them are free! 
On a side note, for those of you who use iTunes, this is the basis to how podcasts are updated and downloaded.  iTunes checks an RSS feed for each podcast that you subscribe to.

Now where does this Pipes thing fit in?  Well, think of the ability to narrow the content that you receive through the feeds.  Maybe you only want local news from your city but the news site you want to subscribe to doesn't have a specific feed for where you live?  Or you want to merge a bunch of feeds together with filters?  Then use Pipes to narrow the original feed(s) and then you subscribe to the new narrowed/filtered one that Pipes provides you.  Pretty cool!

Till next time ...