Graphical 'Pipes' enable Yahoo services to be included in mashups

It's a tool for creating "mashups," which are Web meta-services built upon existing frameworks. Today, Yahoo's Pipes received the Badges feature, which converts Pipes from an RSS feed into a shareable, embeddable widget.

Yahoo has encouraged developers to create mashup services (new tools made by combining pre-existing services) since their emergence in popularity several years ago. Today, it has added Badges to its Yahoo Pipes toolset, enabling users to turn their mashups and feeds into embeddable widgets.

Specifically, Yahoo Pipes is a GUI-based Web application that allows users to utilize data from other sites to create their own customized feeds without writing any code.

For example, a user can create a mashup in Pipes that pulls all Craigslist "for rent" apartment listings together, and applies Yahoo Local filters for proximity to certain stores or public resources. The result is a stand-alone applet that yields only applicable data. The resulting applet can then be placed in a blog or social networking site as a widget.

This way, rather than being presented like an RSS feed, search results can actually be set as a list, slideshow, or geo-coded map if the user so chooses.

Pipes and Badges are quite easy to use, and present developers with few programming skills the ability to create their own mashups and custom vertical search pages.