If you have ever wanted to just browse to a single page and see all of the news from all of the sources you like best, then Yahoo! Pipes is for you. Pipes is brilliant in its simplicity in that anyone can log on and create their own feed network that will display just the news that they want and none of the clutter.

The interface is quite intuitive. Simply by adding pre-configured modules, setting a few variables and dragging “pipes” between the various modules, any user can have their own custom feed up and running within minutes. Once a Pipe feed has been created, it can be saved and called upon like any other feed on the net, from whatever RSS client you like best. One of the nicer things about the new service is that feeds can be easily shared with friends, who then have the ability to clone and modify it to fit their exact needs.

You could, for example, create a feed that automatically goes out to all of the major news sites, like CNN.com, NYTimes.com, et cetera, and aggregates all of the main news stories so that they can all be presented to you in a single unified feed that automatically sorts them by the publication date. Obviously you can get far more creative than that – the possibilities are endless, as cliché as that sounds…

Another neat example that can be found on the main Pipes page, is matching Flickr photos with New York Times articles so that the titles of the stories are used as keywords to perform searches for matching photos, which will then be displayed side-by-side with the text.

As simple as the concept is, it’s surprising that no ones has come up with this particular solution before. The concept of “piping” isn’t new per se, but it has never before been done for the web. The original concept dates back to the early world of UNIX where data from one application could be linked to that of another, so that the inputs, actions and results of one would automatically influence the rest of the applications that were piped in to maximize efficiency.

Enough with the chatter, here is the all-important link:

Yahoo! Pipes

Oh, and by the way, check out my quick piping job: