Mashing up feeds just got a whole lot easier with the recent launch of Yahoo Pipes. In it’s simplest terms it allows you to easily combine multiple feeds into one, stringing together many simple operations, piping the output of one to the input of the next, to create something new and more complex. It has a graphical pipe builder that allows inputs from different feeds (Yahoo local, CraigsList, Flickr, RSS) which can then output the results as an aggregated feed or a web page.
More to the point it’s easy to use. Could this be the start of something really big? The idea that users can easily mash-up multiple feeds to personalise pre-selected content from around the web takes this whole idea to a new level of usability. Perhaps in the not so distant future models of this kind will form the basis of how we aggregate all our text and visual feeds from around the web into a usable interface that gives us everything we need. As also seen on Giles’s blog where you can check out the Ogilvy Blog pipe.
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