I've been dabbling with content, syndication and stuff for a while now.. and this just blows my mind: Yahoo! Pipes . Didn't blog about it yesterday because the site was overwhelmed, and you would've only gotten "Unable to reach website".. anyways..

What is it about? I wouldn't be able to describe it like Tim O'Reilly has, but its basically Yahoo! Pipes lets you treat any feed as a source of data, add filters, conversions, sort, truncate, combine them into some output that pleases you.

Screenshot

Meaning, I can probably do things like ask for your name, put that into a Pipe that plucks your wishlist off Thinkgeek (or your blog), get a list of those items selling on ebay, filter them against the cheapest finds on Froogle and viola - a cheapest possible gift for a friend! Anyways, or use the Pipes to do some other sick thing you can think of.

All drag and drop. Very spectacular, sleek, browser-based UI. +1 geek point to Yahoo!

Screenshot-1

 

Update: After playing for a little while, it makes you wish you could have more Operators, e.g. truncate a string, etc... and it'll just be horrible to wait for Yahoo! to keep up with the requests.. hopefully there'll be a plugin mechanism for that, like DabbleDB's innovative approach of plug-outs.