The release op Yahoo! Pipes is definitely the news of the day:
Pipes is a hosted service that lets you remix feeds and create new data mashups in a visual programming environment. The name of the service pays tribute to Unix pipes, which let programmers do astonishingly clever things by making it easy to chain simple utilities together on the command line.
Of course I have tried out Pipes, and used it to create a consolidated feed of all my writings.
Until now, I have two remarks about this service:
- I tried to sort my writings by publication date. It did sort them, but did not recognise the date format used in some feeds, starting with the weekday (Mon – Sun). Therefore, my writings made on Wednesdays ended up at the end of the list;
- As there still are relatively few Pipes, it is easy to game the listing, which is sorted by the number of times a Pipe has been run. I simply clicked a few time on the Run this Pipe link, and little by little moved upwards in the list.
Update: Two minutes more clicking, and my Brain Network pipe ended up halfway on the second page, in front of some way more interesting feeds. Help me get to the front page by running my Pipe!