Yahoo Pipes and Google Gears for Nonprofits

Published May 31, 2008 @ 12:54PM PT

Yahoo Pipes

Pipes is a web service that allows users to easily build web-based applications from aggregated web feeds, web pages and other sources of content. The drag-and-drop user interface makes it dead simple to quickly create useful applications from various data sources.

Some examples below:

Content Keyword RSS
This pipe will search news sources from multiple sites such as Digg, Technorati, Yahoo News, PRWeb, and Google News, compare content to remove duplicates and output a unique RSS feed full of content related to your keywords.

YouTube tags to RSS
Be alerted when videos on Youtube are tagged with specific keywords that you may be interested in watching.

Social Media Firehose
This is a big, fat, wide-reaching net of social media searches to alert you every time your brand or product is mentioned by anybody on a slew of social media sites, including flickr, twitter, friendfeed, digg etc.

Bestselling Books
Keep up with the Amazons bestselling booklist. This Yahoo Pipe creation is updated hourly to include the most popular books on Amazon.

GeoAnotated Reuters News
Uses the geonames.org RSS-to-geoRSS webservice to add location information to Reuters newsfeed. The result is displayed using the Yahoo!Maps AJAX API
Nonprofits will find the service beneficial for augmenting their own data, with Pipes geo-location mashups, buzz monitoring tools and data analysis.

Dapper is a similar service, based in Tel Aviv, that also makes it easy to reuse content from any web site.

Yahoo! Pipes

Google Gears

Gears "is an open source project that enables more powerful web applications, by adding new features to your web browser." With Google Gears, you can -
Let web applications interact naturally with your desktopStore data locally in a fully-searchable databaseRun JavaScript in the background to improve performanceI use Gears to run GReader offline, to check Remember the Milk and more recently, I'm able to to use Google Docs when disconnected.

Gears is exploring implementing other uses as well:

Multiple File Upload: Using the File System API, Chris demonstrated a multiple file upload experience.

Resumable File Upload: He then showed a YouTube mockup that showed uploading multiple files, seeing their status, and after a connection died showing how the file resumes and doesn't start from 0% All using a ResumableRequest that sat on top of the Blog API and HttpRequestFind nearby stuff! A Google I/O demo searched for beer, resulting in local places around the Moscone Center. This example used the Geolocation API which uses GPS, Wifi IDs, Cell IDs, and IP address to work out where you are

Google Gears