Nestoria Blog

Dearest readers, my apologies, my apologies!

In my frenzied RSS-induced excitement yesterday I forgot to mention one key benefit of our recent changes to the Nestoria house and flat RSS feeds - you can now drop Nestoria RSS feeds into Yahoo! Pipes and mash it up!

Not sure what a Yahoo! Pipe is? Rather than being boring and technical I point you to internet pulse groper Tim O’Reilly’s excellent overview, in which he hails pipes as nothing less than “a milestone in the history of the internet”.

Have a peek at this example of homes for sale in Manchester, or click on this screenshot.

Of course, as with Google’s recent support of GeoRSS, you may ask why you would want to mash up Nestoria property listings on a map when we do a pretty good job of it directly on Nestoria. Agreed, agreed. But the magic of pipes is that you can keep mashing data from across the internet as your little hacker heart sees fit and then get the result as your personal RSS feed. The limit is your imagination. So go crazy kids.

Why is it so special that Nestoria RSS feeds can now be piped about the internet? Well, unlike in the US geocoding of location data in the UK is actually quite a difficult (and/or expensive) feat (see Nestoria Engineer Marc Tobias Metten’s geocoding presentation from last winter’s London Perl Workshop). The US has many housingmap sites and there’s even an example “Apartment near…” pipe in the pipe example gallery, but to our knowledge we’re the only ones to offers RSS and API access to geocoded property data in the UK.

Finally, not to get too misty eyed, but as some of you may know I spent over five years working as an engineer (and briefly in business development) at Yahoo! It’s great to see some true innovative product work coming out of the ‘hoo. Keep it up yahooligans! The more innovation the better.

I now close. Feel free to congratulate me on making it through this post without the obligatory “put that in your pipe and smoke it…” reference.