Yahoo! Pipes 'a milestone'

Here's a screengrab of Yahoo! Pipes launched last week.

Nik Cubrilovic at TechCrunch explains "the product name is taken from the world of UNIX where a pipe is a conduit for the transfer of data between applications, while with the Yahoo product it is a conduit for data between web services.

In a basic form Yahoo! Pipes allows you to take data from one or more sources and to bring it together, for example - to aggregate a group of feeds."

Tim O'Reilly describes Yahoo Pipes as a milestone in the history of the internet and is openly excited at "the enormous promise in turning the web into a programmable environment for everyone." O'Reilly points out that many people might be thinking that 'pipes' are just another way of mashing up data. "But to develop a mashup, you already needed to be a programmer.

Yahoo! Pipes is a first step towards changing all that, creating a programmable web for everyone."

One minor glitch in this wonderful new Internet milestone from Yahoo! is the apparent lack of user documentation. However 'MrsSpeaker' has an easily digestible introduction to Yahoo!Pipes here.