Yahoo Pipes compiled to Python now run on Google App Engine

I used Yahoo Pipes in two clever, useful ways.

One: I would tweet announcements for @asuSoDA, the Software Developers Association I ran at Arizona State U. But these are easy to miss, especially if one doesn’t use Twitter, so I used Pipes to clean up the RSS feed Twitter published, stripping the redundant nature of each tweet starting with "asusoda:", for instance.

Two: A professor published homework and grades online, by adding a paragraph starting with date. I used another tool that scrapes HTML into RSS, then piped this into Y! Pipes, where I used regexes to not only give the RSS entries nice titles, but also linked to homework details pages, which had guessable names but the professor did not link to from the announcement pages. So if his note including the phrase /[Hh]omework ([0-9]+)/, I would wrap this in <a> tags as appropriate.

I found this visualization to be really interesting, powered by Yahoo Pipes: http://www.xefer.com/twitter/ericflo

Pipes is a great way to transform RSS feeds into useful data. 400 data feeds from a site? Turns into 1, etc.

I read a few online comics that have RSS feeds, but don't include the comic in the feed. I use Yahoo pipes to insert the image into the feed body.

I use it to trawl Craigslist when I'm looking for a specific kind of vehicle. To give you 2 examples why this is useful - First, you can search a couple nearby CL areas at the same time. Second, people enter "Mazda RX7" many different ways- such as "Mazda RX-7" or "RX7"- and you can also search for both "1988 Mazda RX7" and "88 Mazda RX7" and combine the results. Thus, once you identify your criteria and thoughtfully consider the queries you should run, you won't have to dig through the website anymore, and only ever see the results you care about with excellent accuracy- I did some manual double-checking at first to make sure I wasn't missing ham, and I'd say I was getting 95% of the ham. It's also easy to filter out the spam.

Plus, new results are delivered within 60 minutes of being posted, so if it's a really hot deal I won't be out of the loop.

Looks like you could ask Yahoo:

YOU SHALL NOT:

Sell, lease, share, transfer, or sublicense Yahoo! Pipes or derive income from the use of Yahoo! Pipes in conjunction with Yahoo! APIs or other web services, whether for direct commercial or monetary gain or otherwise, without Yahoo!'s prior, express, written permission;

http://info.yahoo.com/legal/us/yahoo/pipes/pipes-4396.html