Well, if you haven't heard, Yahoo! has launched a new service called "Yahoo! Pipes". From the looks and from what they say, I think its a nerd "Fifa 2007". But, I'm really confused. What I know is that it has an interface where I can integrate 2 or more feeds into one.

It reminds me of Unix pipes but I'm not an expert at this either. So, a n00b-oriented answer would be really appreciated. Thanks in advance. (regular jazz)

Yahoo Pipes is a publicity stunt designed to keep a has-been from going under.

I just spent the last half hour or so checking out Yahoo Pipes and while I haven't explored it too much it looks pretty cool.

I won't claim to understand very well what you can do yet, but it took about 5 minutes to get used to the basic interface to create a pipe and then a couple minutes each to create two pipes.

The first pipe I created was a simple search engine. I created an input asking you to type a search phrase fed the results through three different seo blogs and then output the results. Nothing really special since both Yahoo and Google allow you to create your own custom search engines that can do the same. It was an easy pipe to allow me to get used to the system.

For my next trick I created an rss aggregator. I grabbed two fetch modules and supplied each one with a feed to an seo blog. I piped the output of each feed into a truncate module to limit the results from each to 5.
I then piped the outputs of both truncated feeds into a union module so the results of each would flow through one pipe.

The output of the union module I fed into a sort module. I set this module to sort the results of the two feeds by their publication date in descending order. I took the output of this module and piped it to the final pipe output module.

When I was done and ran the whole pipe it displayed a total of 10 feeds, 5 each from two blogs, in the order from the most recently published to the last published.

This all could have been and has been done without Yahoo pipes, but with pipes it took me less time to create the simple feed reader than it did to type out how I created it here.

I didn't publish my pipe and I'm not really sure what you do with them after you have published them. I assume you can use any pipe you create on your own site. I'm not sure if when published only you see your pipe or anyone can see it. I think they're yours alone unless you share them.

The services you can currently access are Yahoo search, Yahoo Local, Fetch (which fetches a feed), Google Base, and Flickr. There's a URL Builder, which I haven't explored, but someone else used to create a price watcher on eBay.

Basically you can create some mashups without having to know how to program anything. I can see where if Yahoo adds more services you can access or if the URL Builder gives access to a lot of APIs then it can be a powerful tool to create a variety of things.

Ok a little more digging. Once you publish a pipe it's public and anyone can access it or clone it so they can add on to it. People can subscribe to your pipe and if you want to do anything with it on your site you have to access it as you would any other rss feed.

The basic idea is you can create feeds that are more than the average feed.

This much buzz over a lame feed generator ? I mean, it should have some more functionalities. Yahoo! won't launch a product for doing such a ridiculous purpose. Yahoo! is gone mad I guess. Let me check it out too. I might learn a little bit.

Hey, I got some interesting resources. Here they are :-
5 cool ways to use Yahoo! Pipes - franticindustries.
O'Reilly Radar > Pipes and Filters for the Internet

Still doing some digging. I think the O'reilly site has more posts on the same topic. So, don't forget to check the main site.

You can get more resources if you visit my del.icio.us profile.

Remember that the two pipes I created weren't meant to be anything all that great. I was simply experimenting with what the system could do. Also keep in mind Yahoo Pipes is new and what you might be able to do with it a year from now could be a lot more than what you can do with it now.

Yahoo has given us some simple building blocks to create more interesting feeds than what's out there now. And as people combine those blocks we'll get more and more interesting feeds.

There's nothing here that can't be done by someone programming it themselves, but Yahoo has made it much easier since you don't need to be a programmer to create a pipe.

I can't say what will come of Yahoo Pipes, but I think it has potential to become something useful.