Folks often ask me how it is I always know about things before they do. A great deal of it is my voracious reading habit, but I owe a great deal of my scoops to a simple utility I created with Yahoo! Pipes. Pipes is a mashup editor that allows you to take feeds and pages from a number of different sources, and re-apply the data to other services or feed types. In my case, I created a feed based from a aggregated search query to the Twitter public timeline, Technorati and Google Blog Search - and all without typing a line of code.
Pipes has several major updates today, ostensibly the result of "a hectic 24 hours as part of the recent internal Y! hack day." The first of the updates is an interface for the iPhone to the Pipes system, allowing you useful things like localized traffic maps, something obviously useful on the go, and the Price Watcher, suggested for use while standing in line at Frys to determine if you're really getting the best price.
They've also updated the process to find other's pipes. Once you've created and published a pipe, it has always seemed to be a nebulous process to promote it from within the community. Most searches I've performed only return about nine or ten results, but now searchers will be able to browse by category, format and tags, instead of simply searching.
Finally, they've also squashed a few bugs of note. They've updated their language support (I've noticed Japanese and Arabic results showing up in my Pipes the last day or two, as opposed to strings of blocks), as well as enhanced the Regex module. Most interestingly, though, you'll be able to determine the number of times your Pipe has been run (which doesn't appear to be working properly yet - my pipe is run about every 30 minutes by my reader, but only shows one run).
All in all, Yahoo Pipes is a useful tool for rapid deployment of feed-based data queries, and these are several welcome and useful updates.
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