Earlier today Yahoo [launched Pipes][1], a new service designed to make the process of gathering and mashing up RSS feeds a little bit easier. Although somewhat nerdy and technical, Yahoo Pipes makes it reasonably easy to take multiple feeds and combine them to create unique ways to aggregate data.

The site has been up and down intermittently this morning probably do to the massive amount of traffic it's receiving at the moment. Once Yahoo solves the technical issues I expect Pipes to be popular with RSS aficionados, though it may be a bit complicated for RSS beginners.

To create a pipe, you can select from a variety of services which are drag-n-drop, widget-like interface elements that take a URL and some additional parameters. Once you've entered your URL for each service you'd like to scrap you can then generate a feed. For instance, I took a feed for creative commons licensed photos, Digg posts to the technology section and technorati posts with the tag "web" and generated a feed -- and then the whole site went down.

The interface for creating pipes makes sense if you know what raw RSS xml looks like, for instance there's fields to specify language with the standard two digit language extension, i.e. lang:en. 

If the whole thing puts you off, you can always just browse through existing pipes and select one that sounds interesting. You can also 'clone' an existing pipe, and tweak it to suit your needs. Pipes can really take any feed as an input, though if it's an obscure feed you may have to track down the url yourself. 

One interesting thing I noticed before the site went down completely was the fact that Yahoo include Google Base as one of the pre-built sources. That's the kind of open web we're talking about, why limit what a user can do just because the source comes from a competitor?

There's been a plethora of coverage this morning with a number of people positively gushing over Pipes, like Tim O'Reilly who calls it "[a milestone in the history of the internet][2]." It could end up being that big, but Yahoo has a long way to go before the average internet user is going to find Pipes useful.

And by the way the name is not a reference to Ted Stevens' infamous quote about "tubes", it was taken from the unix tool of the same name -- super nerdy goodness.

When Pipes gets back up I'll update this post with some screenshots.

[2]: http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2007/02/pipes_and_filte.html "Pipes and Filters for the Internet"
[1]: http://pipes.yahoo.com/ "Yahoo Pipes"