Universal presence pipe

About two years ago I created a simple presence/alert/observer Yahoo! Pipe for Spotify. Now, that pipe works pretty OK for that specific task, but as soon as I wanted to try something else the need for a modified pipe clone stopped me. Later I thought: “well, shouldn’t be too much hustle designing a universal pipe…”.

So one not-so-sunny day I created a new Pipe from scratch. This probably too complex little thing of bits n’ bytes is called Universal Presence. The purpose of this Pipe is to gather and mark/highlight content from the web which concerns a certain subject.

A what-pipe!?

Yahoo! Pipes is an amazing tool and a great example of a modern web application. Pipes is a powerful composition tool to aggregate, manipulate, and mashup content from around the web.

Basically, you manipulate feeds of items by using a thought-through graphical user interface.

Advanced features of the Universal Presence pipe

In order for this pipe to be really useful, I put alot of time into adding three different filters:

• Filters for skipping items containing certain data
• Filter for skipping items not containing certain data
• Filter for highlighting items which matches one or more criteria

The way it works is that you go to http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.info?_id=d0a66b6ca2b1dbd74a157ef909171775, fill in at least one Query keyword and hit the rather small “Run Pipe”-button.

Now, try messing with the other options, like highlighting terms and content.