Several suggestions have been posted to the Yahoo Pipes team — anonymously :) — about how they might enhance their spatial support, and it appears that they are listening. Today, they posted two interesting announcements:

• Spatially-enabled feeds are previewed in Yahoo Maps
• KML output is supported

I’m really impressed with these advancements but a good blogger always finds something to complain about. ;)

I did a few tests and, while their spatial support appears to have become a bit smarter, it still has a long way to go. Click on any of the images below to go to the source…

The first test I did tests whether a simple points-based GeoRSS feed will automatically show up as location-enabled:

No dice; it isn’t that intuitive :(

The second test added a LocationExtracter into the stream:

Yes! It works! And… in Google Earth ™ too:

OK, so giddy with my success, I decided to test a somewhat more complicated GeoRSS feed with polygons:

So much for enthusiasm. Not even centroids…

Oh well, I guess if there wasn’t anything left to work on it would be out of beta.

I have to say that the editing experience in Pipes has improved greatly since the last time I played with it a few weeks back. Smoother with far fewer glitches. Great job on the interface…

… but I still always pick the wrong end of a pipe to move.

-J