Yahoo Pipes

There’s a lot of blogobuzz about Yahoo Pipes.

Yahoo describes it as:

a hosted service that lets you remix feeds and create new data mashups in a visual programming environment. The name of the service pays tribute to Unix pipes, which let programmers do astonishingly clever things by making it easy to chain simple utilities together on the command line.

Tim O’Reilly has a typically thoughtful piece about it. He calls it

a milestone in the history of the internet. It’s a service that generalizes the idea of the mashup, providing a drag and drop editor that allows you to connect internet data sources, process them, and redirect the output. Yahoo! describes it as “an interactive feed aggregator and manipulator” that allows you to “create feeds that are more powerful, useful and relevant.” While it’s still a bit rough around the edges, it has enormous promise in turning the web into a programmable environment for everyone…

Brady Forrest has created a terrific exposition of the modules for building pipes.

One of the most intriguing things about Pipes is that it has enabled Yahoo to recapture some of the high technical ground it had ceded to Google. The company — which is having its problems with Wall Street recently — has just raised the threshold for Web 2.0 innovation.

Yippee!