When developing new and innovative web projects, adult marketers can learn much from what the big mainstream players are up to — and often benefit from the tools they create and make available to the public — tools such as Yahoo’s Pipes (pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/).
According to the company, Pipes is a powerful composition tool to aggregate, manipulate and “mashup” content from around the web — using a visual editor that allows users to run web projects, or to publish and share their own web services, “without ever having to write a line of code.”
Each Pipe consists of two or more modules, each of which performs a single, specific task.
With Pipes, simple commands can be combined together to create output that meets the user’s needs; for example, multiple feeds are combinable into one, then sorted, filtered and translated as required, with geocoding that enables viewers to browse the items on an interactive map.
Pipes output data in various flavors of RSS, JSON, KML and other formats, created by simply dragging pre-configured modules onto a canvas then wiring them together with the Pipes Editor.
“Each Pipe consists of two or more modules, each of which performs a single, specific task,” states the Pipes blog. “For example, the Fetch module will retrieve a feed URL, while the Sort module will re-order a feed based on criteria you provide.”
“Each module has one or more terminals, represented by small circles in the interface. You can wire modules together by clicking on one module’s output terminal and dragging the wire to another module’s input terminal,” continues the Pipes blog, adding that “once the terminals are wired together the output from the first module will serve as input to the second module.”
Pipes also enable user input fields, displayable at runtime as form fields.
It sounds quite promising.
