Web services, piped direct

by NIck
Yahoo describes its new Pipes service as “an interactive feed aggregator and manipulator. Using Pipes, you can create feeds that are more powerful, useful and relevant.” We think this is a little modest. Pipes is in fact an entirely new way of manipulating, collating, remixing and then publishing structured data on the web.

A Screen shot of “New York Times Through Flickr”

The visual interface enables users to grab any feed, and connect it to other feeds using ‘pipes.’ The pipes metaphor is borrowed from UNIX terminology whereby a pipe is a process linking two pieces of data together. With Yahoo Pipes users literally connect together the various data sources using blue ‘pipes’. They then apply simple operators to the data and it is outputed to the users specifications.