Social plumbing with pipes
Thursday, November 15th, 2007I don’t know about you but I often find myself wanting to do more with social media sites, I want to know when posts on my sites are submitted, what my friends are up to, who’s going hot, who I should be begging to submit my posts because their submissions always go hot. Like many I’m fascinated with social media and the mechanisms behind them.
RSS – Backend of the social web
Most people will be familiar with RSS (really simple syndication) and the concept of feed Readers, sites like Digg, Stumbleupon and Pligg sites like Sphinn all have RSS feeds for their up and coming and Hot posts. Many also offer additional feeds with perhaps Digg going the furthest by even offering an RSS version of search results. RSS provides a simple clutter free version of the site making it much easier to manipulate and combine several feeds providing a single source for you social fix.
Yahoo Pipes
Yahoo provides just the tool for the manipulation of feeds in the form of Yahoo pipes, there are others including tools from Microsoft and a much more advanced Mashup tool by Google. However Pipes is probably the best known and most used. Rather then provide step by step instructions on how to use Pipes I have found a selection of good tutorials to get you started.
Remember to view sample pipes, rather then just the results you will need a Yahoo ID and be logged in
- Mr Speaker Tutorial
- Yahoo own tutorial list
- IBM Developer works Tutorial
- Find Music Videos in Youtube
- More video Tutorials
- 5 cool ways to use Yahoo Pipes
Copying a pipe
If you want to play with any of the example pipes then simply visit the pipes home page, and click the clone button this will create a copy in your account, just remember to hit save when you are finished.
Exporting Pipes
Once you have your pipe sorted you will want to import it to your favourite application, on the published pipes page you will find several ways to get your data, via email, phone or as we will more likely want by RSS.
To get the RSS simply choose the more options, then the RSS option, copy the URL and your there.
Pipes for Socialites
With the basics of Pipes sorted lets jump into a useful pipe. This simple pipe which is a modified and simplified version of one of Engtechs provides a list of submissions on Digg for a given site. With it you will not have to worry if your site is on Digg without your knowledge.
RSS|Source Code
As you can see the pipe has just 5 components, though to be fair only two of them are of any note, the source which is the Digg search RSS feed and the Regex, of all the things that people are afraid of Regular expressions has to be high on the list, but in reality they are nothing to be scared of.
This example only works with Digg but to modify it for use with Reddit is not hard or any site which offers RSS version of their search which sadly most Pligg sites do not.
Demo Pipes for socialites
seeing your Digg submit is not the only thing you can do people have been coming up with hundreds of uses:
- Analyse Digg
- Add missing functionality
- Provide content for your blog
- Or even sadly your splog
- Analyse Sphinn or any Pligg site
Keep in touch with friends, submits for example here is a pipe that shows submits on Sphinn by the Collective thoughts team. Do you have a pipe let me know so I can add it to the list.
