Yahoo! introduced Pipes more than a week ago which is an RSS mashup application that can aggregate your favorite RSS feeds for better functionality. Much like your own custom web news service. I wanted to try it out since the launch but after massive Digging and resulting traffic , it crashed before I got time to join the fun.

Now to describe Pipes, I think it’s best to use Yahoo!’s own which claims:

Pipes is an interactive feed aggregator and manipulator. Using Pipes, you can create feeds that are more powerful, useful and relevant.

As like any Yahoo! service, all you need is your trusty Yahoo! ID for a quick sign in. You’ll be taken into your Pipes home:

What the hell are Pipes?

If you ever did mindmap exercises back in school, then that all you need to remember in creating Pipes. What Pipes offers is to get feed services and let you customize how each feed would relate with each other. What’s best is that it’s quite easy to do with a drag and drop interface.

On the onset, Yahoo! has four featured pipes that you can look into:

• Apartment Near Something – Features craiglist and Yahoo! Local for an apartment search
• Aggregated News Alerts – Probably my favorite among the featured. It integrates Bloglines, BlogPulse, Findory, Google Blog Search, Google News, Ice Rocket, Technorati, Yahoo! News, and MSN Live News.
• Upcoming.org Combined Feed
• eBay Price Watch

Here’s a quick way to create your own Pipes. You can start by dragging out a “Fetch” module that includes a text input filed. Here you can put in the URL of an RSS feed of your choice. This automatically creates a “Pipe Output” module.

Clicking a button at the bottom of the “Fetch” module generates a flexible hose (hence, “pipe”) that follows your cursor. You can connect the pipe to the Output module and you have an instant application in just a few minutes.

After creating your own pipe, you can share this with others with the “Publish” option.

As far as mashups go, the more features combined, the more effective they are to cover the grounds that you need. At least Pipes lets you do this without much fuss and a somehow intuitive and interactive way.

I tried using the featured News Aggregator and found it very helpful in its rawest form. I tried putting in LifeSpy as feed too.

Here’s a screenshot of me creating my Lifespy How-to Resource Pipes:

If it seems a bit complicated at first, try customizing the featured ones first to get a good feel of the interface. Computerworld has a very nice tutorial for using Pipes here.

Note: Pipes interfaces featured in the screenshots are property of Yahoo!