Just a few days from being launched and Yahoo Pipes is putting lots of minds to work:
- five cool ways to use Yahoo! Pipes
- del.icio.us flavored web search
Lots else. What comes next? Only time will tell.
Yahoo! has just launched a new service called Yahoo Pipes which offers users the ability to easily create data mashups from remixing popular feed types, including Yahoo! Search, Google Base, Flickr photos and any RSS feed on the web. Yahoo! describes it as an interactive feed aggregator and manipulator that allows you to create feeds that are more powerful, useful and relevant.
Pipes also provides a set of functional modules to let users manipulate and transform data in oder to get the desired output. This set includes a powerful content analyzer, several data formatters, sorting modules and even translating services using BabelFish translating engine.
All these modules are integrated in an easy-to-use visual drag and drop editor that simplifies the job of building a mashup without writing a single line of code. The resulting feed can be for private use or shared with the Internet community. As Tim O’Reilly has defined it:
Yahoo!’s new Pipes service is a milestone in the history of the internet. It’s a service that generalizes the idea of the mashup, providing a drag and drop editor that allows you to connect internet data sources, process them, and redirect the output.
According to Google, their mission is to organize the information. In this case Yahoo! has won a battle letting the users create more organized, filtered and useful information by theirselves. Could it be a step towards Web3.0 in which users not only contribute but can take advantage of the rest of information their own way and share it? What comes next? Only time will tell.
Recently we saw the acquisition of StudiVZ, an online german student community (facebook clone), bought by a german media giant. Now it’s turn for MyBlogLog that has been acquired by Yahoo!, as stated in MyBlogLog official blog. The unofficial numbers are around $10 million.
MyBlogLog is an online service that creates communities among blog readers who like to read the same blogs and so far it the latest step in the so-called Yahoo!’s “social media” expansion that began in 2005 with the acquisition of flickr, a photo sharing site, and continued with del.icio.us, a social bookmarking site, and Upcoming a calendaring site with, of course, capabilities to share events in the purest web2.0 style. Who comes next? Only time will tell.