C3 Patent and Intellectual Property Law

Go back to your yahoo pipes page, under the “Sources” menu on the left, click “Fetch Feed” and drag that to the grid [below, 1]. Now, we'll add the Twitter feed already in your clipboard by pasting it into the open field in the “Fetch Feed” module [below, 2]. You'll notice that the module “Pipe Output” was created automatically. We need to connect those two to see the output, so click on the circle at the bottom of the “Fetch Feed” module and drag to the circle on the top of the “Pipe Output” module [below, 3]. Down at the bottom of the screen is the debugging window where you can see the results of your pipe [below, 4]. Right now, it''s essentially just an RSS feed that's been renamed. Go back to your Twitter page and enter some more searches and copy/paste each one's RSS feed into another line in the “Fetch Feed” module.

At this point, I have three feeds coming into the pipe, all Twitter searches for the terms “patent,” “copyright,” and “trademark” which are being aggregated into a single feed. [below, 1] You might need to click “Refresh” in the debugging window to see changes. Save your pipe by clicking the “Save” button. [below, 2]

Now, you could stop right there and have a useful RSS feed that contains the results of multiple Twitter searches. If you click on “Back to My Pipes” [below. 3], then on the name of your newly created pipe, you'll be presented with a number of options on what to do with your pipe, such as posting to Google Reader, MyYahoo, or grabbing an RSS feed that you can use in other readers. There are also other options that should satisfy nearly any of your content needs.

Simply aggregating multiple feeds is useful, but there is still quite a bit of chatter on Twitter that we can filter out without losing relevant posts. To do that, I use “Filter” module under the “Operators” menu on the left of the pipe grid. [below, 1]In this filter I'm blocking posts that are ReTweets or responses, so I only see original posts. Also, shortly after first making this pipe I noticed a number of posts about “patent leather” that I didn't need, so I filtered out those. Then, when Michael Jackson died there was a huge spike in people tweeting about his patented dancing illusion so I added to my filter to block items mentioning him. To attach the “Filter” module to the pipe, move your mouse over one of the circles with a thread leading to another module and when the scissors icon appears, click it and then trade the new links. In my example, “Fetch Feed” gets linked to “Filter” which is linked to “Pipe Output.” [below, 2]

Now, I have a functional Twitter search aggregator that contains mostly relevant material. One very nice thing about the way this works is that once established, the output RSS feed stays the same, so I can go into this pipe and add searches or filter items without having to change any settings in my RSS reader. A similar pipe for a business monitoring it's brand might aggregate mentions of the brand itself along with common misspellings and the names of competitors. Keywords related to the business might also yield usable data, but maybe too much noise. If Twitter eventually adds geocoding data to tweets, a pipe can extract that data and limit results to a certain area, which would make keyword searches much more valuable to small to mid sized businesses.

This is really just a very small example of what Yahoo Pipes can do. Going back to the Yahoo Pipes home page will let explore how the modules work or let you look for public pipes that others have built. From there, you can save the pipes you like them under your profile and tinker with them.

Update: August 21, 2009, Twitter will soon be embedding location data in messages. Imagine the targeted campaigns this will make available to the small business person. If someone in your area mentions "restaurant," a savvy restauranteur will be able to reply to their message and optionally provide a link to a coupon. Someone in town mentions "wedding" and techie wedding photographers can reply with information about themselves; someone grumbles about their grass. . . well, you get the idea. Twitter is about to become a much more useful advertising medium.