João Moreno .com

Now and then, something incredible appears on the Web. This time, it’s Yahoo! Pipes, the new mash-up service from Yahoo!. Those guys are really improving their services and are a major competitor of Google.

Anyhow, this is awesome. Nowadays news are feeds, images are feeds, blogs are feeds, comments are feeds, hell… even feeds are feeds. Syndication has really improved universally understood data transfer, and seems that its potential is unlimited.

Pipes uses a very common Unix feature: pipes! Yeah, original huh? Well, Unix pipes are a way to connect 2 applications, redirecting the output of one to the input of another, thus creating a constant stream of information that we can use to output new data derived from the original data.

Yahoo! Pipes uses that same concept but with feeds. Imagine you read the New York Times’ headlines news feed. Those are just simple headlines. How about reading those headlines, while watching images associatied with it? Here it is, the New York Times thru Flickr feed. It was easily made with Pipes through a visual editor. Just have a look at its “source code“:

Now that’s some serious information piping.

This is a new service, and more and more interesting feeds are appearing every day, and I think this will bring us many new ways of distributing information. Here are some pipes and links:

• Apartment Near Something - Ever wanted to find an apartment close to a park, a school or wholefoods? Now you can…
• Aggregated News Alerts - This Pipe seaches Bloglines, BlogPulse, Findory, Google Blog Search, Google News, Ice Rocket, Technorati, Yahoo! News, and MSN Live News.
• 5 cool ways to use Yahoo! Pipes

I’ll sure be playing with these beatutiful pipes when I get some time and imagination.