David Herrold

Alerts with Yahoo pipes

Posted by Dave | Filed under Mobile, Software, Usability

I’m not sure if I simply missed this when I originally set up my Yahoo Pipes page or if it is a recent addition. I was a little shocked to see the Google RSS chicklette in the header of my pipe output page. There are several other options (Bloglines, Netvibes, Newsgator, etc) in the “more options” link. All I have to say is, kudos to you, Yahoo, for recognizing the usefulness of having your competitors’ feed links in your product.

The other thing I noticed recently is the mobile alert system Yahoo offers for Pipes. This seems very useful. Imagine you are searching for a Ford F-150 in Houston. You could build a pipe combining search result feeds for F-150 on Craig’s list or Yahoo autos. (You can use other search engines like cars.com or auto trader, but results without RSS feeds are a bit trickier…but still possible).

So, you pipe all those feeds together into one output, sorting the most recent results to the top of your feed. Name and save that pipe. Then you simply set up a mobile alert to send you an email, SMS, or Yahoo Messenger alert whever that pipe is updated.

Maybe I’m letting my nerd flag fly a bit high here, but I really think this is cool.

There are many sites out there that offer saved searches and alerts for specific auto searches. However, there isn’t one site that will notify you when 5 or 6 sites produce new results for your search criteria.

A custom Yahoo Pipes output with alerts will do just that.

If you create an interesting feed with Yahoo Pipes, post a link to it in the comments.  I’m curious to see how the rest of the world uses pipes.

Tags: alerts, Mobile, RSS, search engines, yahoo pipes