I was working on a personal weekend project with Yahoo Pipes, when I took notice of this:
The most frequent feed source used with Yahoo Pipes is Adultfriendfinder. The tag ‘porn’ is not that much used though.
Clicking the link of the adulfriendfinder source leads to dozens of pipes, most of them of elementary functionality that simply extract an element from the feed of the site.
To Yahoo‘s credit, most of them are also inactive but, still, they show up in the listing. If you click on one, most likely you will get:
My first click was not so harmless though: it took me to a feed that displayed something like a youtube video player, which, when clicked, redirected to web site that Firefox notified me it was blocked.
What a pity that such a wonderful mashup engine cannot find its way into more prominent use…
I think that what you are seeing has more to do with a person, or persons, generating a huge number of pipes in order to get gullible users to visit risky sites than people actually using those pipes.
My guess is that if all of those pipes in the index reflected Yahoo! user accounts that have been removed and pipes that have been removed the figures would look very different.
@hapdaniel Thanks for commenting! Yes, what you say,is quite possible . But this takes some in depth knowledge of the internet and its pitfalls to form this judgment. The casual internet surfer get another picture. Yahoo should clean this up.
I certainly agree with you there.