Jumping on teh intarnets bandwagon, I’ve been playing around with laying some pipe, Yahoo! style. Iskold and MacManus have the best explanation as they draw a parallel between it and relational databases and just like those databases it can have a bit of a learning curve but it allows for some pretty powerful and nifty connections to be made once you get a hang of it.

Below is a screenshot of my Planets Pipe which mixes together Gnome, KDE, and Ubuntu sorted descending by date then by post title.

Squiggly lines abound!

As far as Pipes go this is pretty basic as it just folds the feeds of three sites together into one, the real power lies in using operators to chop up, drill into, and slice ‘n’ dice the data. For example, you could build a Pipe that feeds you info about a geographic location from photos on Flickr, listings on Craigslist and Freecycle, concert information from Pollstar, and events from Meetup. That’s the beauty of pipes is that it treats the Internet like a giant database and you can sort, query, and mix data to your hearts delight. As for myself, I am still getting my head around it and musing over what sort of data mash would have the greatest utility in my life.

What kind of pipe would you lay (using Yahoo! :-P)?