There’s a buzz in the web developer community over the new Yahoo! Pipes service - it’s been flagged up on O’Reilly Radar and Read/Write Web. It’s not as pretty as GoogleMaps but more significant in what it can allow you to do.

As the name suggests it is more to do with the plumbing behind the scenes than enhancing the user experience. However there are many exciting possibilities that it opens up - bringing content together from disparate websites and then combining them until you have something that could be feed into your own site.

The idea is borrowed from the pipes and filters functionality offered in Unix - take the information coming out of one process and feed it into another. Yahoo! Pipes applies that paradigm to the Internet. You start off …