Ever since I first started playing with RSS feeds, I’ve always dreamt that one day someone would come up with an online tool that makes it easy to aggregate multiple feeds. For a brief half-hour today, I thought maybe Yahoo! Pipes, which launched yesterday, would prove to be the answer to my prayers. But no. Instead, it illustrates just how elusive remains the dream of easy data mashups.

What I wanted Yahoo! Pipes to do was create a composite of several different RSS feeds on the topic of web services and SOA. I first set up a web page to publish this selection of feeds in 2002, but I finally gave up on updating the page roughly a year ago when one of the feeds switched to FeedBurner and somehow broke the feedreading program I’d written. In any case I’d always wanted to upgrade the page to present a composite ‘river of news’ with the freshest items at the top, instead of publishing each individual feed separately.

This is the sort of mashup that Yahoo! Pipes ought to excel at, but it fails at a very simple hurdle. Let me start off though by paying tribute to the designers of Pipe and make clear that they have made it exceptionally easy to link to feeds and mix them together. The trouble with making it so easy to get thus far is that it just gets you to the next obstacle that much more quickly. It took me no more than a few minutes — aided by a quick scan of this introductory tutorial — to fetch two feeds, filter one of them, splice them and then run a sort. But here’s the problem I encountered when I looked at the sort output:

Read More :   http://blogs.zdnet.com/SAAS/?p=278

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