Yahoo! Pipes just launched

A really cool application, Pipes, from Yahoo! launched the other day and has the potential to really make it easy to mashup web applications and repurpose data.

It is loosely based on the Unix pipes model of using small programs chained together to process data where the output of one program is the input to another program. With the Pipes application you use RSS (or ATOM) feeds as your source data rather than text files and then use the available transforms and other data source to mashup a new feed that can be displayed using a number of different renderers including a map output. Here is an example of how you can build a pipe with variables and multiple stages:

The whole project reminds me a little bit of my XQuery project I did so long ago though much better executed and more approachable. Though as soon as they open up the ability to create more transformation types I will probably drop XQuery in there to do the dirty work.