Yahoo! pipes - Feed aggregator and manipulator

The other day Yahoo! released “pipes“. A drag and drop interface which allows you to combine several feeds into one, using results from the first to manipulate (filter, sort, count, etc.) results from the second (and so on).

Initial impressions of the user interface blew me away. At first I thought pipes was Flash based, but it’s all AJAX. Frick’n brilliant. The whole AJAX based drag/drag stretchy/shrinky connection points is a first for me.

That said, it does take some brain power to figure out how this machine works. At the moment there is little to no documentation, few tutorials and some of the fundamental functionality like filtering by Dates does not work (yet). The forums do seem pretty active with useful tips.

The service reminds me of database query generators.

With all this talk of generating custom feeds from data where no feed exists, and now piping them all into Yahoo! to perform data manipulation, things are getting exciting.

For instance, Nick Bradbury (HomeSite, TopStyle & FeedDemon) created a demonstration pipe which gets the iTunes Top 10 feed, pushes those results into a YouTube search, which returns an RSS feed of Videos for each Top 10 track. Très cool.

Now what? How about adding the new YouTunes feed to a yourminis.com YouTube video widget, plopping onto your blog and mashing up the place.