Yahoo! Pipes rocks without Flash or Silverlight

Roy Osherove is talking lots about Yahoo! Pipes and they look very interesting – here is a screenshot of one I was in the middle of creating (you can't see it, but my mouse pointer was a hand-shape holding the bottom end of that curved pipe):


The idea behind it is an interesting one, bringing Unix command line pipes (|) to a web-based GUI:

“Pipes is a powerful composition tool to aggregate, manipulate, and mashup content from around the web.

Like Unix pipes, simple commands can be combined together to create output that meets your needs:

• combine many feeds into one, then sort, filter and translate it.
• geocode your favorite feeds and browse the items on an interactive map.
• power widgets/badges on your web site.
• grab the output of any Pipes as RSS, JSON, KML, and other formats.”

Here are some more screenshots, firstly me choosing to add a sort-by clause to the results:


Lastly the final results of the pipe, showing a visual representation of the shape, plus the details of what was actually used, and the results in the main panel:


I've published this pipe and given it a nice name so you can see the results yourself.

This is a great example of using a dynamic HTML interface to do something useful on the web. Let me repeat that a different way - there is no Flash/Silverlight used here!