Yahoo Pipes Review

Much has been written about Yahoo Pipes and lots of how-to tutorial. I was pleasantly surprised to see the ease of use of Yahoo Pipes and how easily I could create a simple pipe to get data in RSS feed format. Yahoo Pipes contains lots of ready-made objects for easy filtration of data. So I became bolder and started creating more complex pipes with advanced filtration and that’s when my problems began.

The single biggest problem I am facing with Yahoo Pipes is that it is unreliable. Running the pipes fail frequently even when there is no problem in in getting output in edit mode (debugging window). The problem compounds when you are using one pipe within another. I am not exactly sure what is going wrong but my guess is that Yahoo Pipes has problems handling large amount of feed items.

I may have seen problems in filtration but there I am not sure. I need to investigate more, if only I could get the pipe to run consistently.

Yahoo Pipes doesn’t contain many complex filters I had in mind but then what can you expect of a made-for-all system?

How often does the pipe run? Is it run only when it is fetched? I found that RSS feeds may be cached. I would really like to know the following about Yahoo Pipes:

1. Caching policy - how long is the output cached
2. Feed refresh policy - is the pipe refreshed only when it is fetched? does pipe refresh also refreshes dependent pipes or they need to be refreshed separately?
3. How can I create my own filters / joints?

Overall it is a nice tool for simple needs and for non-programmers. I love the user interface. However I think we need more robust and richer tool for professional use. Is Google Mashup Editor any better?

I will give Yahoo Pipes 7/10 on user interface, 4/10 on robustness, 8/10 on ease of use and 8/10 on debugging capability. The single best feature of Yahoo Pipes is its easy to use and intuitive UI. The single worst part of Yahoo Pipes is its robustness.