Yahoo introduced a very interesting service this morning: Yahoo Pipes. If you have a Yahoo account (and are somewhat geeky), go check it out. It's an RSS workflow system, where you can take RSS feed(s), do dome processing and logic and produce

From a BlogMatrix technology point of view, it's quite interesting. It uses a similar data model to ours, what I've been calling the "Google Base" model of the semantic web: entry centric, where each entry is extended by ( attribute, value ) pairs. In particular, there's no "deep" model of attribute values with hierarchy or graphs. The beauty of this system is not only that it's fairly straightforward to do, but it's also easy to mentally grasp and thus more like that people will actually use it. Here's the cool this: with the BlogMatrix Platform we should be able to very quickly demonstrate feeding data into this tool (real soon) by feeding our structured data input into our RSS output!

I wonder if there's a way to export the programs created by Yahoo Pipes? And I wonder what this means for Teqlo? And I wonder if we can create a general web programming model on this in a sort of  Dabble DB plugin sort of way?

Here's what people are saying:

• Nial Kennedy:
  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. My favorite operator is the location extractor which analyzes an item's text attempting to identify addresses, locations, or the URLs of popular mapping services.
• Anil Dash:
  Most importantly, and perhaps most key to the success or failure of Pipes, are the social functions that underpin the application. With Pipes, it's easy to make your own web services public, to clone web services that others have made, or to offer your own services for others to clone. That element of social sharing of code, first pioneered by platforms like Ning, makes the open source ethos much simpler to participate in. Instead of setting up complex version control systems and submitting patches to a central repository, application cloning works on a principal of infinite forking, taking the idea of embracing failure and building it into the platform. Code 'em all, and let blogs sort 'em out.
• Tech Crunch:
  The beauty of the application is with its simplicity - a user can take any sources, user input requests or the above mentioned module and drag+drop them into place and then connect the pipes. Within minutes I had built an application (also known as a pipe, they should probably change the name as not everything can be a pipe) that would search for ‘Techcrunch’ in a variety of feeds, bring that data together, sort it and filter it for unique results. I saved the application and published it
• Tim O'Reilly:
  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. Yahoo! describes it as "an interactive feed aggregator and manipulator" that allows you to "create feeds that are more powerful, useful and relevant." While it's still a bit rough around the edges, it has enormous promise in turning the web into a programmable environment for everyone.
• Brady Forrest: Deconstructing a Pipe
• Brady Forrest: The Modules For Building Pipes
• Global Nerdy (update):
  There is one important difference between Yahoo! Pipes and those of the Unix variety: while Unix pipes were made with programmers, sysadmins and tech tinkerers in mind, Yahoo! Pipes are made to be more user friendly. While you’ll still need a tiny bit of tech savvy to use Pipes, the user interface, which allows you to visually hook up pieces of code that provide an API significantly lower the barrier to entry for creating applications — you no longer have to be coder!