I'm sure some of you are familiar with Yahoo Pipes. You may have already created your very own Rhapsody pipe. I on-the-other-hand have not done much with Pipes and the recent news that it was their first year anniversary reminded me I’ve been remiss. So, in this post I will talk about a Rhapsody Pipe that I recently put together. If its been a while since you played around with Rhapsody Web Services this may be a great time to reengage via Yahoo Pipes.

The pipe I created searches some popular music news sites using artist names from my Rhapsody artist listening history feed (you can find your feed here here). The pipe defaults to using the Rhapsody artist chart feed so the output is also valuable to non-Rhapsody users.

However, all in all I would say the process of creating this pipe was pretty painful. The problems I encountered mainly stem from the Yahoo Search module. Although the user interface suggests that you can filter results by multiple domains - in fact you can only filter by one domain. Moreover, if you try to use more than one the filtering is disabled and you get generic search results. This required me to split my feed several times and use multiple search modules. The problem with this approach is that you are restricted to only three search modules. Net: This means that my pipe can only search my three favourite music news sites which is unfortunate because I tend to use a many more news sites.

All that being said, I still really like Pipes. Once you know the current limitations (Pipes is still in beta) it’s great for setting up quick little applications that solve small problems. Plus, if you solve many small problems for yourself and others it eventually all adds up. Plus, I have been enjoying the pipe I created since it uses what I've been listening to lately to customize the music news that ends up in my RSS reader (although I still need to tweak some things to increase the relevance of the results). Since building this first pipe, I've been toying with the idea of extending it to grab artist hometown information from our data.xml feeds so that I can see where the music I listen to comes from (can you say Google maps mashup?).

Anyway, I encourage others to try out our web services in Yahoo Pipes or to explore the pipes that have already been created using Rhapsody feeds. And, if you create a new pipe let us know by adding a post to our example applications page.

--Dave