Top Ten Picks: Yahoo! Pipes Video-Based Mashups

Yahoo! Pipes has been helping people mash for a good few weeks now. Buzz has built considerably around the platform, and some of the items that have resulted from user experiments are becoming increasingly popular. NewTeeVee found ten video-related mashups that they suggested their readers give a look-see, which we thought you, our readers, would like to learn a bit about, too.

Some - like “YouTunes” and “Last.fm meets YouTube” and “Coming soon trailers” - appear elementary in purpose. (Two of the abovementioned mashups search for videos corresponding to titles listed in newest iTunes Top 10 Music Downloads roster and tracks last played in Last.fm. The third looks for new trailers on Apple.com and Google Video.)

Others are more complex, among which “Uber Tube,” “Multi-site video search” and “TorrentSearch2” are a few. “Uber Tube” aggregates all site-wide RSS feeds from YouTube; “Multi-site video search” visits many major video-hosting services: YouTube, Google Video, Metacafe, Yahoo! Video, DailyMotion, Break, and Grouper; “Torrent search” looks through the selections on Isohunt, Torrentspy, Mininova, and BTJunkie for public domain video downloads.

NewTeeVee’s top choices list contains four more mashups, too, including “MP3 blog videos,” “Rotten Tomato Tubes,” “TV series downloader,” and their absolute favorite, “NewTeeVee by keyword”. The last in the list technically isn’t a video search pipe, but in case you want to put your video viewing on hold and read about video, “NewTeeVee by keyword” is the mashup for you.

It’s important to emphasize that these Yahoo! Pipes-born creations aren’t located in their own special places on the web. Each bears the Yahoo! Pipes theme, and for that their visual differences are few. They also look somewhat uninteresting at first glance because of their uniformity.

In addition, those who wish to see video embedded within the mashups themselves will be further disappointed, as the mashups exist only as junctions to whatever information is sought via the custom “piping”.

With all that said, there’s still good in what’s presented in some or all of the publicly generated automated services. If you’re a fan of public domain videos, the all-in-one “TorrentSearch2” tool is very useful for finding new content. “YouTunes” allows one to view the week’s top music videos as recognized by iTunes without having to pay the $1.99 per item through the iTunes Music Store. The list goes on.

There are plenty of mashups to browse on Yahoo! Pipes, and the pile continues to grow. These 10 picks are but a small selection of what’s available. But if you’re interested in Web video, this list is a good place to start your perusal of what is possible with Yahoo!’s mashup creator.

Read NewTeeVee’s original post on the video mashups here.