Ever looked for a new apartment with special features such as lake side online and fat up with doing e.g. google maps look-ups for each inserat over and over? Or showing artist pictures while “mouse overing” at last.fm? This is supposed to be possible with pipes (I haven’t had the urge trying it out myself, yet).
See how O’Reilly describes the new service:
The Internet is transforming itself from a collection of web pages into a huge distributed database. There’s a wealth of data out there-not just RSS and Atom feeds, but XML data on where to find a new apartment, how much to pay for a new car, how to see if there’s a storm approaching. If the Internet is your new database, you need a tool to mine that data-to merge and sort and search and filter that data. That tool is Yahoo! Pipes. Widely touted as an RSS feed aggregator, Yahoo! Pipes is more than that. With Yahoo! Pipes you can manipulate virtually any web-accessible XML data source, and then publish these data mashups for anyone to use-anywhere.
How I found out? Well, I meshed up some old school media (good old FM Radio) with RSS, piped it through my web browser and on via an essential audio player and combined supper with news consumption in time space.