Yahoo Pipes. Awesome. Seriously.

Every now and then you come across an idea so completely useful and straightforward that you wonder why it took so long to come about. Yahoo Pipes is a perfect example, and I really encourage you to check it out.

There’s a whole lot of really useful information flying around this interweb-thingy, yet so much of it is in a prescribed format. You can subscribe to individual feeds using any number of readers, but why can’t you manipulate these feeds into something you – and other people – might find more useful?

Now you can. Here’s an example. For any Chinese speakers reading, this link will stream our most recent blog headlines to you in Chinese, translated on the fly. Setting that up took me all of 2 minutes. Impressed?

I’m still familiarising myself with the deeper workings of the tool and will keep you posted if/when I manage to create anything truely interesting. In the meantime, here’s a challenge for you: create one pipe. Doesn’t matter what it does. Doesn’t matter if anyone apart from you finds it in the least bit interesting. Just have a go and I guarantee you’ll be glad you did.

Happy piping!