[GEEKY] Alternative to Yahoo Pipes? Looks really interesting…

Check out this post from Lifehacker:

"Want to play with RSS feeds? Try xFruits, where, according to tech enthusiast Steve Rubel, you can "teach your feeds all kinds of new tricks."

He's not kidding around, either: you can create a PDF file from an RSS feed, send an OPML to your mobile, aggregate, and lots more. I played with it a little bit and was suitably impressed by all the options; it looks like they're even adding the option to create RSS feeds for your desktop files soon. â_" Wendy BoswellxFruits [via MicroPersuasion]" (from: Mash up RSS feeds with xFruits)

I haven't looked at this yet, but it is quite intriguing.

Oh… Why haven't I looked yet? Well ever since xFruits was mentioned on LifeHacker, it has been unable to be reached. The server is probably getting overwhelmed by loving interest like mine.

I say "server" singular? I am just assuming that we are talking about a single server. But even if that's not the case, the fact that the service is unavailable right now says something about how hard it is to build a scalable web service, especially if you are giving it away for free. It is why it's nice to see Yahoo, Google and Amazon publishing services.