Yahoo Launches Pipes, an revolutionary RSS Remixer

Click here to read the full story >> Yahoo! recently released Yahoo! Pipes, a visual editing interface for web feed manipulation and reconstruction. The 5-person Pipes team (Pasha Sadri, Ed Ho, Jonathan Trevor, Kevin Cheng, and Daniel Raffel), part of the Yahoo! TechDev incubation group, spent about 5 months developing the product to help people better remix the syndicated content they find online.

Yahoo 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.

Yahoo! Pipes opens up some interesting possibility for feed aggregators, letting users filter out unwanted content affecting their experience. Pipes opens up a few feeds that were not practical for a human to read in the past, either due to a high volume or possibly a foreign language.

A traditional web feed lets you select your news from a set menu, while tools like Yahoo! Pipes let you build your own dish with only the ingredients you care about. The editing interface connects pre-configured modules and their option, creating a new feed accessible as RSS, Atom, or JSON. Anyone can share their modules, or clone the work of others to tinker a few things and enable their own customizations.
Yahoo! Pipes also makes it easy to remove advertising from feeds or otherwise reformat your content.