• Red Herring, Monday, February 12, 2007 11:01 AM

Yahoo Pipes, a new service for bringing disparate data streams together to a single Web site, launched last Wednesday. Maybe the positive reviews backfired, as the site "clogged" the following day due to demand. Yahoo spokespeople said the Pipes launch was intended for testing by a small pool of developers; big-time press and blogger coverage resulted in an unexpected swarm.

Pipes is now back up, and although it's in beta, the service puts the Sunnyvale, Calif. Web giant ahead in the nascent market of mash-ups. Mashers will enjoy the site's easy-to-use drag-and-drop interface, allowing users to integrate data from RSS feeds, Yahoo services like Yahoo Maps, Flickr and Del.icio.us, as well as feeds from competing Google and Microsoft services.

RedMonk analyst Stephen O'Grady said it caters to a "very important community of early adopters," while opening up a complicated concept to a less tech-savvy user base. He added that mash-ups, like any user-generated content, could be an area fraught with copyright concerns if adoption becomes widespread.

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