Yahoo Pipes for Second Life news

This week Yahoo released a new service called Yahoo Pipes that allows anybody, especially non-programmer types, to be able to create mashups of feeds and services into a single pipe that generates RSS feeds. This allows all sorts of feed mashups that can be cloned by others, modified further and then shared so others can come along and clone your modifications. Y! Pipes has been on my list of things to check out this week when I had a few minutes and this evening after the radio show I finally got enough time.

One of the first things I did was conduct a search for “second life” and sure enough someone named silentium had already created a pipe for Second Life created from several different sources. I made a copy of the pipe and added VTOR to the list of fetched sources.

The pipe result can be seen here and the RSS feed is here if you want to add to your RSS reader.

This could be especially useful to other VTOR authors or SL residents wanting to scan many sources about Second Life news in one dynamic feed rather than pouring through multiple ones. You can clone the application, change the sources and/or modify to check out other virtual world news. In fact do a search first, maybe somebody else has already created something for WoW or MMO/MMORPG in general and you could clone that.

There’s a site called Ning that tried to do somthing vaguely similar (purists will forgive me for comparing the two, but they do share some conceptual similarities) but with full fledged applications like hotornot type PHP scripts and to date Ning hasn’t really taken off. Because Y! Pipes generates RSS feeds that can be consumed in other applications and could present some very interesting possibilities.