This evening we pushed a number of updates to Pipes and there are some exciting new things to tell you about. In brief, we added new ways to browse and explore Pipes, updated the design of the Pipes website, added a number of new features, introduced two new modules, and fixed many bugs.

Many users have asked for additional ways to explore all the Pipes that are being created. When you are on the Browse page you now have ability to browse all the Pipes on that page by their Tags, and by the Sources and Modules contained in them. Look for the links to these options in the sidebar.

Here are a few examples:

• browse all published Pipes tagged with 'Digg'
• browse all published Pipes containing the Source 'digg.com'
• browse all published Pipes containing the Module 'urlbuilder'

We have updated the look, and some functionality, of the Pipes website:

• On the Browse page all key actions for a Pipe (run, edit, delete, publish, clone) are now a single click away, the descriptions for each Pipe are now automatically exposed, and it's possible to browse a Pipe by its unique tags and sources. To see these options hover over any of the listed Pipes.
• The sites navigation has been moved horizontally to the top of the page and the homepage has been revamped.
• We've incorporated user feedback and redesigned the runpage so that it's easier to use.
• You can now add tags to your Pipe on its runpage, look for this feature in the sidebar.
  

We also introduced two new modules in the Pipes Editor:

• The String Replace Module lets you find and replace the first, last or all occurrences of a string. You can manually enter the text in the input boxes or pipe it in from an appropriate User Input module.
• The Sub String Module cuts a range of consecutive characters from a string. Enter the numeric character starting position and the length of the characters you want to match. Here's an example using both new modules to get you started.

Finally, we've squashed many bugs that were reported on the Suggestions and Discussion Boards. Thank you for taking the time to report them.

As always, we look forward to hearing your Feedback and appreciate you helping us make Pipes a more useful product.

On Wednesday, June 6th, Pipes will be offline for approximately 2 hours starting at 6:30 PM PST. We'll be performing a routine, scheduled update and expect regular service to return by around 8:30 PM PST. Click here to find out what time the site will be offline where you are located.

We thought it would be useful to showcase a few Pipes that use the new Geo features we announced.

• Apartment Near Something was one of the original examples we created to demonstrate the usefulness of Pipes. Now you can search for an apartment close to something and plot the output on a map!
• Kiva Loans by Location takes a listing of open microloans on Kiva.org and GeoCodes each item based on the nationality of the entrepreneur requesting a loan. The end result allows users to browse a interactive Yahoo! map to see where Kiva is currently fund-raising.
• Photos Near Napa Wineries annotates Yahoo! Local results for Napa Wineries with images from Flickr that were taken nearby.
• Socialight Flickrin' takes location-based Sticky Notes from Socialight.com and searches for pictures from Flickr based on the content of the Sticky Note. This example demonstrates how to use the Location Extractor Module to ensure that a feed containing GeoData is properly marked up.

We can't wait to see how you use the new Geo features in Pipes! As always, we hope you'll share your feedback and suggestions with us.

The Pipes team is proud to announce two new features that we've been working on that enhance our support for GeoData.

• First, we added a interactive Yahoo! Map to the runpage of any Pipe containing GeoData. To see this feature in action run the Apartment Near Something Pipe. Here's a still image of what the map looks like:
• Second, we added an additional output renderer which allows Pipes containing GeoData to be emitted as a KML file. If there's GeoData in a Pipe you can find a link to the KML output at the bottom of a Pipes runpage listed in the Tools section. It's possible to use the KML output in a variety of ways including in Google Earth.
  

We posted a followup entry that highlights some example Pipes that make use the new Geo features.

In addition to our enhanced geolocation support there are some other improvements to announce:

• You can now inline edit the Title and Description text listed on the runpage for your Pipes.
• We've added the ability to filter dates using the options "before" and "after" in the Filter Module. These parameters can accept dates in a variety of relative formats such as "n days ago", "now" and "today".

When we launched Pipes one of our featured examples let you combine multiple feeds on upcoming.org. A couple of weeks ago upcoming.org announced that they're using this Pipe to power the same feature natively on their site!

To access to it, click on the link to your upcoming.org username and then click on the link you see below labeled 'All My Stuff in RSS.'

For those of you that aren't familiar with upcoming.org, it's a great social events site that offers feeds for things like your subscribed events, your friends' events, recent activity related to you and your friends, and general news happening on the upcoming.org site.

The Pipe we created aggregates all of those items into a single feed so that you can get all your upcoming.org goodness in one place.

We've always felt that, in addition to being a great tool for personal use, Pipes is a great way to quickly and easily enable more functionality in a web application.

We're glad to see that the team at upcoming.org agree!

Thanks to everyone who has continued to provide the Pipes team with valuable suggestions. Today, we pushed a number of improvements that we want to tell you more about.

1) You can now use subfields in the Regex and Rename Modules. It's also possible to refer to an item using dot syntax: ${published.timezone}.

If something in the preview pane is nested three levels deep, foo->bar->baz, you can refer to it as ${foo.bar.baz} in Regex replacements. Here's an example to get you started.

2) Titles in a Pipe that contain quotes and/or angle brackets no longer get mangled

3) You can now use URLs that have urlencoded characters (like %22) in the Fetch Module.

4) Modules can now contain arbitrary text. In the past, fields that contained values that looked like tags (for example: <something>) were getting unexpectedly escaped or stripped.

5) Certain BBC feeds that were broken now work.

We pushed several new updates to Pipes based on the comments we've been receiving at the Pipes Suggestion Board. They include:

* A new Split Module, for creating duplicate copies of feeds.

* Significant bugfixes to both the Filter and Regex Modules, so that pattern matching will now work correctly with Chinese and Russian text, and Unicode in general.

* A significant bugfix to the Translate Module, it should no longer mangle encoding.

* The introduction of a new URL syntax across the site (note: these changes should be backwards compatible for Pipes that users have already subscribed to.)

* The list of sources associated with a Pipe now appears on the run page.

As always, we look forward to hearing what you think!

Geek laureates, rock stars and ninjas sought for Yahoo's Advanced Development Division, parent of Hack Yahoo!, Pipes, and other projects too secret to mention.

Are you inspired, brilliant and swinging for the fences? Code your own web apps on the weekend? Hack anything that's not tied down? Void your warranties on a regular basis? Push pixels straight into tomorrow?

We're looking for frontend web developers, backend engineers, and visual designers. If you're interested in learning more holler out to add-jobs [at] yahoo-inc [dot] com and include your resume.

The past week has been incredibly exciting for the Pipes team. We launched our public beta last Wednesday and the response has been amazing.

Already, there have been some great Pipes created, some of which we'll feature here. In addition, some people have already come up with some fantastic tutorials and examples. While we're working hard to get some more detailed tutorials of our own up, you should definitely take a look at some of these to get started.

• Introduction to Yahoo Pipes (Mr. Speaker)
• YouTunes: An Example Yahoo Pipe (Nick Bradbury)
• Yahoo Pipes: A User's Guide (Datamation)
• 5 cool ways to use Yahoo! Pipes (franticindustries)
• Yahoo! Pipes tutorial: Build an RSS mashup (ZDNet)
• Geek to Live: Create your master feed with Yahoo! Pipes (lifehacker)

Thanks to your comments on the Pipes Suggestion Board, we've been able to address numerous bugs and take note of many new feature requests. In particular, we want to point out that date sorting should be functioning properly now.

As always, if you have ideas for improving Pipes, drop us a line and if you want to talk about Pipes, there's a ton of discussion going on on our message boards.

In other news, you might notice that the stats aren't quite updating properly. We're working on fixing those and will report back soon when it's all back to normal.

Finally, this marks the official launch of our Pipes blog. Keep an eye out here for news and updates. We're here to feed your imagination so please keep sharing your feedback, we're listening!

What Is Pipes?
Pipes is a hosted service that lets you remix feeds and create new data mashups in a visual programming environment. The name of the service pays tribute to Unix pipes, which let programmers do astonishingly clever things by making it easy to chain simple utilities together on the command line.

Philosophy Behind the Project
There is a rapidly-growing body of well-structured data available online in the form of XML feeds. These feeds range from simple lists of blog entries and news stories to more structured, machine-generated data sources like the Yahoo! Maps Traffic RSS feed. Because of the dearth of tools for manipulating these data sources in meaningful ways, their use has so far largely been limited to feed readers.

What Can Pipes Do Today?
Pipes' initial set of modules lets you assemble personalized information sources out of existing Web services and data feeds. Pipes outputs standard RSS 2.0, so you can subscribe to and read your pipes in your favorite aggregator. You can also create pipes that accept user input and run them on our servers as a kind of miniature Web application.

Here are a few example Pipes to give you an idea of what's possible:

* Pasha's Apartment Search pipe combines Craigslist listings with data from Yahoo! Local to display apartments available for rent near any business.

* Daniel's News Aggregator pipe combines feeds from Bloglines, Findory, Google News, Microsoft Live News, Technorati, and Yahoo! News, letting you subscribe to persistent searches on any topic across all of these data sources.

What's Coming Soon?
Today's initial release includes a basic set of modules for retrieving and manipulating RSS and Atom feeds. With your help, we hope to identify and add support for many other kinds of data formats, Web services, processing modules and output renderings.

Here are some of the things we're already got planned for future releases:

* Programmatic access to the Pipes engine
* Support for additional data sources (such as KML)
* More built-in processing modules
* The ability to extend Pipes with external, user-contributed modules
* More ways to render output (Badges, Maps, etc...)

Pipes is a work in progress and we'll need your help to make it a success. Try building some simple pipes and advise us what works well and what doesn't in the online editor. Tell us how you'd like use Pipes, what we can do to make cool things possible, and show us ways you've found to use Pipes that never even occurred to us. In return, we promise to do our best to make Pipes a useful and enjoyable platform for creating the next generation of great Web projects.

And please have fun!

The Pipes Development Team