New Yahoo Pipes Features

Posted on May 12, 2007
Filed Under web 2.0, mashups, mapping |

Yahoo Pipes has a number of new features, including the incorporation of Yahoo! Maps. Great for finding apartments near something, or pretty much any geoweb application. It works at least for American Zip codes and Canadian postal codes.

I tested a customized pipe on Toronto Craigslist listings, for apartments, since I’m trying to move back there this year. The drawback that still remains is that the necessary semantic information has to exist in the source data (in this case, Toronto Craigslist). So if you’re looking for an apartment in a certain postal code that’s near, say, a park, and the classified doesn’t specify relevant information, it may not be included in the mapped results.

Relevant listings appear on as numbered icons on the map. As well, the current icon of focus will have its Craigslist entry displayed below the map. Click on the link, and you’re redirected to the apartment’s web page. Or click on the forward/ backward buttons to scroll through the listings. Apartment hunting was never so easy.

And of course, this is merely one application of these new geoweb features. There are surely countless more geoweb apps, and I’ll scratch my head a bit to see what I can come up with. But here are a quick few to try: mark off locations with free Wi-Fi, certain types of restaurants, celebrity sightings, sports events, festival locations, etc.

This is extremely exciting. I already love Yahoo Pipes, but this just takes web mashup building to a new level.

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