Yahoo! Pipes Adds Geo Data Support

pipes map

Yahoo! Pipes, the graphical, web-based RSS re-mixer (Radar post), has significantly increased its geo support. They now provide a map output that plots your data on a Yahoo! supplied map. Pipes will also export geocontent in KML, which means that Pipes content can be used in Google Maps and in Google Earth. It also means that Pipes will start to appear in the increasingly important geoindex of Google.

The Pipes team sent me the following pipes to demonstrate some of the capabilities and the interoperability of their new feature. Enjoy.

Kiv a Loans by Location is a Pipe that takes a listing of open microloans on Kiva.org and geocodes each item based on the nationality of the entrepreneur requesting a loan. The end result allows users to browse a interactive Yahoo! map to see where Kiva is currently fund-raising. It's also possible to use the KML output of this Pipe in a variety of ways including to explore it in Google Earth and Google Maps

Socialight Flickrin'This pipe takes location-based Sticky Notes from Socialight and searches for Flickr pictures based on the content of the Sticky Note. (KML)
Apartment Near SomethingEver wanted to find an apartment close to a park, a school or Whole Foods? Now you can...(KML)
Photos Near Napa WineriesThis Pipe annotates Yahoo! Local results for Napa Wineries with images from Flickr taken nearby. (KML)

I knew that the Pipes team was going to increase their geo support (and we discussed having a map output before launch). I had expected them to output GeoRSS before KML (and we had also talked about GeoRSS support and KML).

KML stands for "Keyhole Markup Language" associated with Google Earth and until recently was a proprietary Google format. Very recently Google began the process of turning KML into an open standard with the OGC (details of that are pending and will be discussed by the OGC at Where 2.0). Google must have hoped (known?) that this step would get companies like Yahoo! to start supporting KML (many startups already have been). The more data that is available in KML, the more data for their geoindex (Radar post). I suspect the other large mapping portals will add KML support to their products and add their own geoindex.

Mikel Maron [ 3 May 2007 03:30 AM]

Actually Pipes does output GeoRSS, but of the old W3C variety. Would be nice to see them support georss.org as their flickr brethren do.

steve [ 3 May 2007 06:19 AM]

At the announcement, I pointed out that Pipes was nothing new and wouldn't achieve any more than previous graphical environments like Labview and Quartz Composer.

It has now been a few months, and I see that Pipes has achieved even less than I expected, and I expected very little. Instead of reporting extra features, why not report when it's achieved something noteworthy?

Marcelo Calbucci [ 3 May 2007 02:11 PM]

That is cool, but I wish the would fix a problem they have where you can't sort items by pubDate (publish date) because their pipe doesn't interpret Date-Time.

Search the web for "Yahoo Pipes pubDate sort problem" and you see what I mean.

Daniel Raffel [ 7 May 2007 11:50 AM]

Marcelo: We thought we had addressed the pubDate sorting problem but discovered a few more issues. We'll have a fix live by this Thurs. Thanks for bringing this to our attention!
- Daniel Raffel, from the Pipes Team

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