Early on at Zillow, I used Yahoo! Pipes as a way to aggregate and filter web results with zero actual programming knowledge (Pipes was mentioned by Justin in this article from 2010). It was a cool tool back in the day.

Fast forward several years, and Yahoo! has shut the service down. Of course, IFTTT now exists – but’s it more for accomplishing tasks than for doing deep data aggregation and analysis.

A new tool I just learned about today: Knime.

This morning, I had coffee with a friend who does SEO & business intelligence for a fairly large company, and mentioned he’s been using Knime heavily because it removes his previous reliability on his development team to produce data for him.

One sample use case for an agent/broker: query everyone on Twitter who mentions your area of expertise – such as “Sammamish” (a city 20 minutes east of Seattle) – on a monthly basis, and dump a CSV file with those users ordered by number of followers. You of course would then want to reach out to those people and begin to build relationships. Or, something as simple as crawling your entire sitemap, and providing page load time for every page as a way to identify those with slow response times.

I’m going to play with it as a means to find travelers who would be interested in Horizon, but I highly encourage you to download it and find the use cases relevant to your business.