Often times one stumbles on a really cool tool, yet has no idea what to use it for. Now don’t get me wrong, there are some really cool things people are going to do with the new Yahoo Pipes application. From what I can tell the application is meant to be a program to help one organize/aggregate different types of data. The description has to be broad as it looks like the application can do a whole lot of stuff.

It takes the idea of a mashup a whole lot further. Essentially, anyone with an idea can go and create a mashup of the different services out there (flickr, craigslist, googlemaps to name a few) and create their own feed based on those services. What I see being really great about it is the fact it will become one of those communities that gets better with time. Why?

First off, Yahoo did something really smart and made it so when one wants the datafeed they created, they have to publish it. Upon publishing it, the feed becomes public domain, as well as the recipe to make it. As this community grows, users will piggy back on each other and build feeds/mashups that keep getting better and better. And when any average internet user can go and see how to build a feed that integrates 3+ services into a mashup, there is nothing to keep them from adding to it or changing it slightly to make it better.

Secondly, it’s useful for anyone searching for those niche datafeeds. I want my celebrity news to be a feed of who’s popular in celebritydom, but instead of the headlines, I want to see the newscasts people upload to youtube. This can be built quite easily. Now I can have a news cast delivered to me daily of who is in the news via Google News via YouTube. This is taking the idea of watching what you want or viewing what you want on the internet one step further.

I’ve never been a big fan of Yahoo, but after seeing this, and then thinking how much I love my flickr account and my del.icio.us account, I gotta say they are doing some really good things.

Now I just have to think up an idea (or rip off someone else).

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