Monday, April 25, 2011

Mashup editor Pipes - how did I miss this?

OK, still not sure how I've missed this, but I've just run across a mashup editor from Yahoo! called "Pipes."

Using a visual editor resembling a mind map or flowchart tool, you can fairly quickly stitch together content sources and filters to create a "mashup." An excellent example is this mashup of US Census data to display the population of the states in map form.

Another more dynamic mashup called YouTunes uses iTunes download rankings to pick the Top 10 songs, then displays the YouTube for the music videos of those songs.

I was able to use Pipes as a workaround to the Flickr-Flash monster. I wanted a Flickr slideshow based on search results to display on mobile devices such as iPhones, but Flickr's slideshow is in Flash. By using Pipes, I was able to search Flickr based on pre-defined search terms and display the results as an image badge, which I then embedded in a Weebly page, and it displays in iOS just dandy!

So, those of you who are currently taking NET115S, here's a new tool you might want to explore. For those of you who will be taking NET116S in the Fall, guess what we're going to do?

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