Mashup applications combine data from different Web services; some of the most popular mashups involve taking data from one source, such as real-estate listings, and displaying them on Web-based mapping services.
With Yahoo Pipes, which is in beta, the company is trying to give developers--and tech-savvy users--more power in combining structured data feeds, typically done through the Really Simple Syndication or Atom protocols.
Although the service currently works only with RSS and Atom feeds, Yahoo intends to expand the number of data sources with which people can work. It also plans to allow third parties to create add-on modules and to expand the service's information output composition to include formats such as maps.
