What are Yahoo Pipes?

Yahoo has launched Yahoo Pipes, a free online service that makes it possible to create web services without any professional IT knowledge. Best feature of this service is that it, while it is fairly simple for novice to use, it is fairly exhaustive for those who care to get under the surface. It lacks the user interface.

It makes it possible to mix various data feeds from any source as RSS, Atom or XML feed and create a data mesh using a visual editor. This makes it possible to publish your web services without having any need of programming language, using just drag and drop editor that allows merging internet data sources. All one has to do is to pick few feeds, fix rules for data processing and you get the results for another feed. You can also program it to get automated end result. Its simplicity and power is bound to amaze most users. For absolute beginners, it has pipes “URL builder” that can construct input to a site's query function, understand variables and loops etc.
Yahoo pipes allow developers to use two websites in a extended and useful way. Though well received, Yahoo pipes have lot to improve upon in improving upon ease of use as parsing and filtering a stream of XML is not as easy. These mashups have limited scope but knowing yahoo, it is only a matter of time that new and much more powerful version of it is launched.
Would pipes be Successful?
The question is rather late. In fact it already is, despite some rough edges, it offers a platform that is open and approachable. It is a powerful interactive feed aggregator and manipulator’ as Yahoo would like to describe it that allows you to create useful and relevant feeds and has enormous potential of turning the web into a programmable environment for everyone. It is increasingly being used for building a custom mashup to search for traffic along your own routes every morning, or to create a news aggregator that searches multiple sites for subjects you care about. You can send it to any feed aggregator of choice, and get results by email.
All said and done, it is fantastic product from Yahoo and Yahoo and has really outsmarted Google by coming out earlier with the product.