However, they are very good at taking input about it:

Yaho o Pipes discussions.

I’m really hoping that they can truly match XSLT’s (theoretical) capabilities and beyond. But there’s still a lot to be said for Pipes and its usefulness to SEOs. I haven’t done so yet, but I figure that anything I cannot do in Pipes, I can send to a Perl or PHP script running XML modules and finish there. If I come up with anything useful, I’ll release it to everyone.

It’s interesting that you should mention Google, because they recently did a developer day on Yahoo! Pipes and how to get the most out of it…

I got last month twice a problem with Yahoo! as a result of well intended feedback and reporting bugs (in non-beta applications). One was only making me mad, the other cost me money, which makes me more that mad.

Different story. I am currently giving Y! a bit more time to get their act straight before I blog about it in a major rant, that Loren might has to go over it to remove the “f” word a couple times hehe. So currently, no help for Y! from me.

Reading your experiences with Yahoo! Pipes is reminiscent of my first experiences with Apple Automator — seemingly full of promise, but a huge let-down.

Have you been in contact with the guys at Yahoo! to let them know?

Agreed, it was back then even more buggy, less stable and had less features, but I had several things in mind which I wanted to do and could not get it done in a reasonable amount of time or not at all.

I was going to use other tools and services to accomplish what I wanted. I use Google Reader since about one year to aggregate RSS feeds and get them sorted by date automatically. I simply use one tag for all the feeds I want to consolidate, make it public and get the feed for the tag. Then pass it through feedburner to make it “pretty”. See the aggregated SEO news and affiliate/internet marketing news.

Adding or removing a feed is done in no-time and was a pain with Y! Pipes if you wanted to consolidate 20-30 feeds. You mentioned OPML support already. I guess that would make it easier (maybe).

I also tried to use Y! Pipes to convert a Google Calendar XML feed to RSS, convert that the event date will be the published date instead of the date when I added an event to the calendar. Furthermore did I want to merge the event start and end date/time to a string and add it at the beginning of the description, because RSS does not support an “End Date”.

I was unable to get it done with Y! pipes and do it now via XSLT. Check out the RSS version of my industry events calendar to see what I mean.

I was at first very excited about Yahoo! Pipes until I realized that the things I wanted to do either can’t be done with it or are so cumbersome and time consuming that it does not make sense to use the service.

The filter option and alternative sorting is a plus and not as easy or not possible to do with existing tools. If they would just go the full nine yard and provide the needed flexibility it would be great, but from that are they still far far away IMO.

If I were to summarize Yahoo Pipes’ purpose, it’s a tool to mashup RSS feeds and manipulate the data. Sort of but not quite a replacement to the XSLT spec for XML manipulation.

So if you want to filter, query, collate, sort, augment or otherwise manipulate RSS/Atom web feeds and have a visual interface to rapidly prototype, that’s Yahoo Pipes.

I wasn’t totally won over by Yahoo! Pipes originally, but I warmed to it over time.

It may be that it’s because it’s so versatile that it’s not clear what it’s one purpose in life is.

Most people are more familiar with the idea of the one-trick-pony web service, and Yahoo! Pipes isn’t that!

I’d like to see what happens when the likes of an Adobe Apollo web application integrates with Pipes, or maybe Google Gears…

The only disappointment is that users don’t have more control over the actual XML format that gets generated in some cases. For example, I can’t create a YouTube search Pipe then feed it into SplashCast. The latter cannot find the necessary video enclosures. Pipes has quirks that way

But I’m absolutely certain that Pipes should be in the toolbox of all SEOs in some form or another, and I hope to have a hardcore Yahoo SEO Pipes how-to series over at http://rsscases.marketingstudies.net in the near future. The simpler tutorials are at Tubetorial.com

I’ll be providing a few more examples here at SEJ as well.