Yahoo! Pipes: Plumbing for the semantic web

One of the cooler things I’ve seen in a while: Tim O’Reilly writes about Yahoo! Pipes, a new service that’s like Unix pipes for the web. In Tim’s words:

It’s a service that generalizes the idea of the mashup, providing a drag and drop editor that allows you to connect internet data sources, process them, and redirect the output.

Like I said in my comment yesterday, I think that once we get over the hype of Web 2.0, people are going to be looking for better ways to hook all this stuff together. Nobody wants to maintain dozens of accounts just to keep track of all their data. Being able to connect all these sites intelligently is basically what the semantic web is all about, and Yahoo! Pipes looks to be a significant step towards making the semantic web comprehensible and usable by regular people.