Put that in your pipe...

It may be time to fire up that long-forgotten Yahoo! account after all.

Yahoo's new service, Pipes, is turning heads, and with good reason.

Want a two-bedroom apartment near a Whole Foods? Need a studio across from a pub? Look no further. One of Yahoo's featured "pipes", Apartment Near Something, will find it for you. This particular pipe searches craigslist, identifies the location of apartments that match your search, and then examines which apartments are near whatever else you searched for. But that's not all you can do with a pipe.

Yahoo Pipes enables users to control, manipulate, and reuse internet content by creating customized searches. While it's usefulness to technophobes and internet newbies is questionable, it's ingenuity is not. If you've ever had that feeling that it's all been done before, but it all could have been done better, now may be your time to shine. From the Pipes website:

Pipes is a free online service that lets you remix popular feed types and create data mashups using a visual editor. You can use Pipes to run your own web projects, or publish and share your own web services without ever having to write a line of code.

If that seems unclear, it's because a 'pipe' can relate to practically anything you want. One pipe finds people's public photos (on Flikr) of things the NY Times has reported on recently. Another pipe searches Google and Yahoo simultaneously.

I was pleasantly surprised by the results of one pipe, entitled Picture Near Place which promised to find thing X, in setting Y, near Z. I entered 'tree' and 'park' in Madison, Wisconsin. The first result was a tree in a field (possibly in Madison), and the second was a picture of University of Wisconsin's main library with a tree squeezed in the corner. The third was a triple-whammy: trees, a park, and well-known Madison landmark. One of the pictures did look suspiciously like the Serengeti, but hey, it's still in beta.

And because Pipes is still in development, it is yet to be seen exactly how it will be used, and by whom. According to Yahoo, the nifty graphical interface means you can build your own pipe "without ever having to write a line of code." So you don't need to know HTML, but being slightly web-savvy will help. And while services like Blogger and Myspace provide a code-free template within which you can expound to your heart's content, by creating a Pipe, one is creating something entirely different: a web service. Additionally, you can 'clone' other people's pipes and edit them to make a new pipe.

This may signal a greater shift in the way information gets from one point to another over the internet. Bill Thompson, a contributor to the BBC said "this isn’t user-generated content, it’s user-controlled content." He also points out that while Pipes may not be the Post-Web 2.0 breakthrough everyone is waiting for, it is "a glimpse of the networked future, where the world’s information is not only at our fingertips, but available to be mixed, mashed and filtered on demand."

So go ahead, take somebody's pipe, rewire it, and make it your own. Or rather, make it everyone's. And inevitably, someone else will make it theirs.