The web is absolutely abuzz this morning with the news of a brand new product from Yahoo that has the potential to radically change the way data is used on the Internet.  The product, called Pipes, is described by Yahoo like this:

But that description doesn't really do the service justice.  The possibilities of what could be created with Pipes are virtually endless.  You can pull data from just about website, source, or feed… combine it with data from other sources… filter, sort, and manipulate it in a host of ways… and output something unique.  You can publish and share your own pipes as well as copy, edit, and modify the pipes of other people.  It even allows for user input so that users of your "pipe" can enter their location, keywords, etc.

I've been trying to play around with the service all morning.  First it was completely down.  Now it's up and running… but almost every operation that I try to do returns an error.  I can't even save the sample pipe that I was creating (which was an awesome feed of chicken recipes from Google Base and chicken pictures from Flickr… I know you're disappointed).  And now the service is down again.

No doubt they're getting a lot of visitors to the site trying to play around with it.  Why does it not surprise me that Yahoo would release something that they almost had to know would create this much buzz… and not have enough hardware behind it to keep it running. Yahoo… it does you no good to release something with the potential that this service has if it's nothing but trouble from day one.  Yeah… I realize it's a "beta" product.  But from my experience so far, it's more at alpha level than beta.

That being said, several other people were able to play around the service last night before it went down.  And they've all had nothing but good things to say about:

And a couple others:  Jeremy Zawodny, Anil Dash

I think Niall Kennedy makes a great point in his write-up on ramifications of a service like Pipes.  It takes a lot of the control of content out of the publisher's hands.  It can filter out advertising (which is good for consumers, but bad for publishers that depend on that advertising to pay the bills).  It can filter out parts of the whole, rearrange data, and manipulate what you've published until it no longer resembles the original.

Be that as it may, the two biggest aspects of this news is that 1) Yahoo actually did it and 2) It really does have the potential to change the way data is used on the web.  I have no doubt that we'll start seeing some very interesting things being created with Pipes in the very near future.  And it's great for Yahoo that they were able to break out with this product first.  They can finally put a check mark in the "not following" box for something.

But first… they need to make sure the service will keep running.  This initial buzz is going to wear off and if people's first impressions with a product aren't good they're much less likely to come back later to see if you've got it fixed.