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