Yahoo pipes out a challenge to Google

Stan Beer
Friday, 09 February 2007 15:39

Your IT - Home IT

There is so much information circulating throughout the web in the form of XML feeds that it's hard to keep track of it all. However, Yahoo wants to make it easy for ordinary web surfers to pick the eyes out of it all and organize it into a custom made useful format with tools from a website called Yahoo Pipes.

As Yahoo says on its website, Pipes is a hosted service that lets you remix feeds and create new data mashups in a visual programming environment.

According to Yahoo, the usefulness of the huge volume of XML feeds available to web users has been limited because users are restricted to feed readers which can access the information from one feed. However, Pipes allows users to take the data from one or more feeds and use it to build new applications.

On its site, Yahoo provides examples, such as: Pasha's Apartment Search pipe, which combines Craigslist listings with data from Yahoo! Local to display apartments available for rent near any business.

It's basically an application that had to happen in the Web 2.0 environment in which bloggers and posters are becoming one person news sources and news aggregators are picking up all the information on specific topics as fast as it can be posted.

Yahoo Pipes aims to provide ordinary web users with the ability to take the plethora of available data and develop new information applications, such as Pasha's Apartment Search pipe, which will have value for a variety of segments of the global Internet community.

While there have been queries raised about copyright issues of using proprietary content to create new applications, Yahoo, like Google, appears intent on re-writing the rules of content and publishing in the virgin territory of the Web 2.0 space.