Yahoo! presents Pipes Pipes, a hosted service that lets you remix feeds and create new data mashups in a visual programming environment.

Many of our readers are avid Web feed users. We know, because we can track the number of request for our own RSS feeds.

Other readers, who get a “huh?” moment when hearing terms like these, should note that Web feeds (including RSS and Atom) are simple text files that presents the content of a site or a news service.

Hence the Pandia RSS file contains information about the news articles your read now: the headline, the link, an abstract and more.

Using special software or online feed readers like the Google reader, you can combine lists of headlines in one window, making it easier to keep track of a large number of web sites at the same time.

However, the use of Web feeds doesn’t stop there. A webmaster may for instance use such feeds to add content to his or her own site.

Yahoo! is now taking this technique one step further with its Pipes service.

Yahoo! says:

Pipes’ initial set of modules lets you assemble personalized information sources out of existing Web services and data feeds. Pipes outputs standard RSS 2.0, so you can subscribe to and read your pipes in your favorite aggregator. You can also create pipes that accept user input and run them on our servers as a kind of miniature Web application.

What this means is that clever webmasters and programmers may use Pipes to make web applications and services that combines data from a large number of Web feeds.

The examples given by Yahoo! are a search engine that combines Craigslist listings with data from Yahoo! Local to display apartments available for rent and a news aggregator that combines feeds from various blog and news search services.

Webmasters that wants to aggregate news headlines from various sites and make them available to their readers, may — of course — use this service to generate combined RSS feeds.

In order to make Pipes you make use of Yahoo’s JavaScript authoring tool. It seems to us that some programming skills will come in handy, although any motivated webmaster will probably be able to make use of the service with some patience and perseverance.

From a search point of view Yahoo! Pipes falls in the same category as Google Custom Search (tailor made search engines made by webmasters focusing on their favorite sites and interests): It gives web site owners the ability to develop new search tools focusing on the interests of their user group.

This strengthens the general trend towards search results becoming more personalized.

More:

Yahoo! Launches Pipes (TechCrunch)
Yahoo! Pipes: Unlocking the Data Web (Jeremy Zawodny)
Yahoo Launches Pipes, an RSS Remixer (ReadWrite)
Review: Yahoo! Pipes (Matt Cutts)