Yahoo Pipes

Yahoo! Pipes launched last night, opening up an interesting new Unix pipes-like capability for mixing, processing, and using feeds. According to Y!, Pipes allow one to “rewire the web” (their words) by combining, filtering, sorting, truncating, translating, geocoding, etc. user defined feeds. Click here to try out Pipes yourself.

(Note that as I type this the site is overwhelmed with traffic and returning the error message “Our Pipes are clogged! We’ve called the plumbers!”)

O’Reilly published an introduction and overview of the promise of pipes, followed by additional Radar posts providing a technical overview and short deconstruction of one of the example Y! pipes.

Tim O’Reilly started his introduction with high praise indeed:

Yahoo!’s new Pipes service is a milestone in the history of the internet

A lot of possibilities for consuming pipes.yahoo output come to mind. And I find the use of a visual metaphor for indicating user intent very interesting: It’s not new by any means, but nonetheless another informative example of how we can think about empowering users to orchestrate complex operations through simple indications.