Yahoo! Proposed they mashup builder. The main feature that you can design your mashup with graphical designer and use some predefined operators and modules.

The mashup is a pipe in Yahoo! terms. So you can create your pipe with use:

• Inputs from Yahoo Search, Fetch, Google Base, Flickr.
• User inputs: numbers, strings, URL, location, …
• Operators – they help to process data: create loops, counters, filters and other.
• Other modules and operators.

Very interesting is that you can reuse other pipe in your own pipe.

Mostly pipes are suitable to analyze RSS feeds. This is because Yahoo provides several cool modules that work with feed. For example I created a pipe that do the following:

1. Gets user input (search text)
2. fetch feeds from:
1. http://del.icio.us/rss/tag/semantic
2. http://del.icio.us/rss/tag/semanticweb
3. http://del.icio.us/rss/tag/rdf
3. search for “search text” in every entry of feeds

The picture with this simple pipe is shown below.

Pipes can be useful to search what you need across feeds with similar semantic. Especially if you search every day.

It’s not so tricky to create your own pipe. Also I’m sure that number of allowed modules will grow and more complex pipes will be possible just as 1-2-3.

Start from example pipes to understand how they work http://pipes.yahoo.com/tags/example/