Pipes and Tubes

Yes the internet is a series of pipes and tubes and Yahoo takes that quite seriously. Yesterday they launched a service called Yahoo! Pipes.

It’s received quite a bit of traffic and went down for part of day due to the excess traffic to the site.

What is it?
It’s a service that allows you to create your own mashups

How does it work?
It provides a drag and drop editor that lets you find data sources and combine feeds in different ways

What can I do with it?
The service is social, in that you can have an avatar, view all mashups from a certain user and even edit existing mashups to create something new

The editor is pretty slick, using ajax-like technology, rather than Flash and shows actionable modules that are connected by lines.

It’s quite cool and may even be useful if you want to like viewing NYTimes articles with relevant images on Flickr or getting aggregated news alerts from Google, MSN, Findory, Bloglines and Technorati