Yahoo! Pipes Lets You Make Your Own Web Mashups

Yesterday's big tech news was the launch of Yahoo! Pipes (and just to show I don't get any special treatment from Yahoo!, I didn't even hear about it until the day it launched). The site was immediately overrun with people checking out this interesting new service, and I didn't manage to start working with it until late last night. But... what is it?

Yahoo! Pipes is incredibly difficult to describe, but my best explanation is that it takes boring old RSS feeds and lets you spin them in interesting new ways. Some call it a "data mashup," which is about as good a descriptor as you'll find.

Some of the early applications have been interesting, like this "del.icio.us flavored web search." Here's a Pipe I made mashing up movie reviews at my filmcritic.com site with Flickr: The Pipe looks for interesting phrases in the first paragraph of each review and then scours Flickr for related images. Here's a similar one with pictures inspired by recent "Missed Connections" postings on the San Francisco Craigslist (though it frequently shows no results).

I made both of these without reading any documentation (which is scant in any event), but absolute novices will find Pipes confusing. If you want to give it a try, copy (or "clone") another similar pipe to get started.

If you decide to make a pipe, post the link to it in the comments below!