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by Scott Frangos, Managing Editor

Have you taken a look at what Yahoo Pipes can do recently? People are playing the pipes for just about everything these days, including SEO and Social Marketing. If you’ve never dealt with them before, the roughtly one-year-old Yahoo Pipes are:

…a composition tool to aggregate, manipulate, and mashup content from around the web.

Sounds interesting. Basically Pipes are combining and sorting RSS feeds, then filtering them to get a desired result. There’s a couple of interesting twists like adding geocodes to return your results on a browesable map. Currently featured on the home page of Pipes are three feeds — one finds hot deals by running “parallel searches,” another returns photos near Napa wineries by tapping into the Flickr picture base, and the last adds geofeed to the Reuters News Wire, so you can read a news brief overlaid on a map showing the location of the story’s origin. There are some weaknesses and strengths to this emerging technology… so let’s take a look.

Integrating a feed with Yahoo Maps, as shown above, allows you to visualize where Reuters stories originate. Note that the map shows a story out of Paris about the French navy trailing a pirate boat — but the boat incident took place off the coast of Somalia, and the map does not reflect that location.

Pipes for SEO and Social Marketing

The maps tied to Reuter News example above shows that the geographic location while tied to the place the story was filed, do not necessarily point to where the story took place. Still, I bet if our High School seniors would point their browsers away from MySpace to that Pipe, they’d do a lot better on their geography tests.

Social-Media Marketing: Here’s a pipe for social media searches — the Social Media Firehose. Described as a “fat, wide-reaching net of social media searches” by its author (Kingsly Joseph), the idea is that you can track your company, product, services, and even the CEO to see what the buzz is around the internet. Of course, you can always use this pipe to check in on the buzz factor for your competition, too.

One of my clients is a society that publishes rare books by the Persian Mystic and Poet, Rumi. So I tried “Rumi” in the pipe and was surprised to be presented a map which was zoomed in on the city of Bandung on an island in Malaysia. Huh? Turns out for most pipes now, you can view results on a map, as a list of links, and sometimes as an image if they are part of the pipe. So, following one of the links on the map for Rumi I jumped to a Digg.com bookmark, and from there to the originating article on Rumi at a WordPress blog called Creativity at Work.

Alright — the blog and the Digg link are Social Media, I get that part. But why was a english language, dot.com (http://www.creativityatwork.com) blog shown on a map in the South Pacific? The author of that article and BlogMaster for that blog is Linda Naiman, who “conducts workshops on creativity and innovation in North America, Europe and Asia.” Hmmmm. Did the pipe ferret out her work while she was in Asia, or is it just some mistake with the way the pipe was set? Next, since the Pipe encourages one to search on comma separated terms, I entered “Rumi,book”, but got an error: “Pipes encountered a problem while running this pipe: The Pipes engine request failed (-1)”.

Search Engine Optimization: Well, I found some weaknesses in the Social-Media Marketing Pipe, so decided to conclude my visit to Pipe land with a look at the “All In One SEO Pipe” — designed to return “all the best SEO blogs and feeds filters by relevant tags.” I was actually relieved to see there were no maps associated with this Pipe. Instead a list of SEO related articles were returned which I could in turn subscribe to in my RSS reader, or even get on my phone (”excuse me, I’m taking this call from my SEO Pipe”). Interestingly, this SEO focused pipe also returned a couple of articles about Social Media Marketing. I added it to my Google RSS reader.

Below is an example of this Pipe as an embedded “badge:”

Above is the list returned by a pipe, you can get a “Badge” (top live example) for the pipe to display on your website, subscribe to it in an RSS Reader, get the results by email or Phone, and under “More options” get a PHP version as a download.

Conclusion: Pipes with maps are not really presenting coherently synchronized information, and there appear to be some kinks in the system. However, inquisitive BlogMasters and Social Marketers would do well to subscribe via RSS to some pipes on those subjects. Put your favorite Pipes in your RSS reader and see what information flows through the plumbing. And, developers should take a look at the option to get a pipe as a PHP file. BlogMasters may like to use the Pipes “badge” function which “allows you to have Pipes generated content on your blog, website or social network.”