Pipes

I just caught an article on O’Reilly Rader titled “Pipes and Filters for the Internet“. Yahoo has announced a nifty new service called Pipes. According to their site:

“Pipes is an interactive feed aggregator and manipulator. Using Pipes, you can create feeds that are more powerful, useful and relevant.”
AND
“Pipes is 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.”

I’ve checked out a few of the mashups, and some seem pretty useful. And, the visual environment is pretty astonishing. Here’s one mashup that caught my eye:
Picture Near Place
Uses Yahoo Maps, Yahoo Local, and Flickr
You can basically search for pictures within a certain area. The default search looks for parks in the 94024 zipcode that contains trees.
Here’s a screenshot of the visual pipe editor.

This service is worth keeping an eye on!