Yahoo Pipes is Awesome!

For anyone who hasn't tried Yahoo Pipes yet check it out. Pipes allows you to create custom RSS feeds. This is very cool for making complex mash-ups. For example, a friend of mine is looking for an audio position in New York City. I created a simple pipe that uses Google's Job Search and the keyword audio and out came a list of job postings that were mostly relevant. After you make a pipe you can save it to your Yahoo or Google homepage, or access it as an RSS feed, etc.

I heard about Yahoo Pipes from an installation artist who was searching news feeds for different words and then applying that data to a device that dripped paint on a canvas depending on the amount of data received. I was really impressed how easy it was for him to parse so much data down to a single feed.

After playing with Pipes, I think it may be a good solution to an experiment I've been wanting to try. The idea is to get all sorts of real-world data into Flash, use that data to make inferences based on culture and psychology and then have it influence an interactive pet's emotion engine. More simply, if I know it's been rainy and there are a lot of negative keywords in the news the pet could be sadder than usual. If it is close to a cultural, religious, federal holiday the pet could be happier. It is my hope that by creating an emotion engine fed by this data, and then creating a personality that reacts to this data in a certain way, much more realistic virtual characters and environments could be created. Best of all if I use Pipes, I can keep most of the complex parsing out of Flash and use a single feed to get all the information I need.