Yahoo Pipes: Web 2.0 stealing ideas from Unix

Yahoo pipes is a perfect example of how the Web 2.0 can be 'mashed' and (messed) up. You can get the RSS feed for a news website and analyze the contents and then search Flickr for images pertaining to the analysis. All through a GUI of flowcharts and modules just like building blocks in a lego set. Pipes and filters are the widely used concepts of Unix and Yahoo has just applied the same to Web 2.0. XML RSS feeds makes the job much simpler to look at a web site or content from a website as nothing but a stream of data and you can pipe and filter this list and display it any form you want. Then we can create a RSS of the output and integrate it with your site. So you would have the latest content from web for whatever your pipe's logic is.

They have to work around a edges a bit more, but the concept does provide a starting point for how all the age old programming concepts can be applied to Web 2.0.

As a starting point, i created a pipe for viewing all the pictures, pertaining to a city. Basically getting the Location input from the user and then passing it on to Flickr to generate images for the same. Check it out at

http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/nOr_g9nG2xG_KLEJE5PZnA/?input1=new+york&_run=1&=Run+Pipe