Yahoo Pipes - Almost Useless
Yahoo pipes is an interesting idea. You can create “Mashups” from different sources. I suppose they might be useful if you wanted to aggregate several feeds into one and display the result on your own website. I looked through many pipes and could not find a useful application. There are a lot of “find a photo on flickr that matches a keyword in a news article” type of applications. The one useful thing I have found it is easy to create a pipe that scrapes a web site and produces an RSS feed. Not as easy as myrss.com used to be (when it worked) but not too challenging. I think the pipe team could put their graphical tools to work to produce a mind-map application (Google Yahoo! Mind) or some other application of a directed graph. The graphical part of pipes is so good I almost forgot it wasn’t a Google app.