Yahoo Pipes!

Yahoo!'s new Pipes service - which it describes as 'an interactive feed aggregator and manipulator' that will enable people to 'create feeds that are more powerful, useful and relevant' - is getting a lot of coverage around the tech blogs.

From what I've read, the service will allow people who aren't programmers not only to easily create their own mash-ups, but to create super-duper mash-ups, drawing multiple sources of data from throughout the web and presenting it to you in the way that you've designed it to.

This is one of those things I don't fully understand, but I can see the glimmers of understanding ahead of me. At any rate, I've linked below to posts by a couple of people who do get this - and see its potential.

Tim O'Reilly - O'Reilly Radar
Jeremy Zawodny - Techmeme (with links to heaps more stories)
Yahoo! Pipes site - currently crashed by techy eager beavers

Zeitgeist take 2

Nicholas Carr, on Rough Type, has posted the top 10 2006 searches for Google, Yahoo and AOL. His conclusion?

"There's only a single overlap: "American Idol" appears on both Yahoo and AOL. That's it. I would have thought that, given the sheer number of searches done through each engine, there'd be a lot more similarity in the results. I guess it means that very different types of people use each of the three engines.

Looking back over the results, I think I can suggest the following market segmentation: Google users are dweebs. Yahoo users are horndogs. And AOL users are geezers."

Dweebs and horndogs - Nicholas Carr