Yahoo! Pipes – Some bugs, but still awesome
By now, you’ve probably heard of Yahoo! Pipes, that “web 2.0 RSS mashup GUI” thing (if not, read this). I decided to try out the service by creating a merged RSS feed of my activities on WordPress.com, Flickr, last.fm, and Twitter. It only took a few minutes to put together.
Pipes is in beta. There are still some important bugs in the service, most notably (from my experience) that sort-by-pubDate is not working. This applies to grouped feeds as well as single feeds — even Yahoo!’s own example of the “sort” module is affected (compare before v. after). Someone reported this bug as a “suggestion”, and if you’ve played around with Pipes I ask you to consider voting for it.
There also seem to be issues when feeds have non-standard date formats, causing sort-by-pubDate to not function correctly when performed on merged feeds (granted, if sort-by-pubDate is known to be broken in general, one can’t reliably look at this test case).
Also, there’s performance & stability. Pipes was down for a while yesterday adding capacity, so apparently the software driving this stuff isn’t lightweight. Navigating the site is not the speediest experience I’ve had, although it is well designed. In the end, what matters is that pipes themselves are handled efficiently and have good uptime; the logged-in experience is a lower priority (though not by much).
Pipes only launched two days ago, so kinks (get it? kinks in a pipe? ah, nevermind) aren’t unexpected. I hope these sort-by-pubDate issues are fixed soon — my Pants on Everything feed is almost ready to go. 
Update: Looks like sort-by-pubDate is fixed. Woohoo!
