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Yahoo released a new product today, Pipes. They apparently weren’t ready for as much traffic as it would cause and the site is currently down. 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.

I haven’t had a chance to play with it yet, but it seems like a great mashup tool for RSS. Josh Bancroft used FeedShake recently to combine a few of his feeds, and I was thinking of doing the same thing. This Pipes concept might work out in the same way, with more flexability.

Once it’s up and running again, I’m going to try out a few things to see what I can come up with.

Try it yourself (once it’s back online) here

Yahoo had released it’s year-end Top Searches of 2006. There are a wide variety of categories, so feel free to chem them all out. These two below are the ones that interest to me most:

Top 10 Overall Searches

1. Britney Spears
2. WWE
3. Shakira
4. Jessica Simpson
5. Paris Hilton
6. American Idol
7. Beyonce Knowles
8. Chris Brown
9. Pamela Anderson
10. Lindsay Lohan

Top 10 Blog/Blogger Searches

1. Perez Hilton
2. The Superficial
3. Pink Is the New Blog
4. Huffington Post
5. TMZ.com
6. Daily Kos
7. Jossip
8. A Socialite’s Life
9. Little Green Footballs
10. Gawker

Here are some more updates Google included in the Gmail update today:

Embarassment-reducing new message notifications
Ever replied to a message only to find out that someone sent a better, smarter reply right before you? Now, if someone sends a reply while you’re in the middle of reading a conversation (or replying to it), you’ll get a notification that a new message has arrived. Click “update conversation” to see what you’ve missed.


Forward all
When viewing a conversation, use the new “Forward all” link on the right if you want to forward the entire conversation instead of just one message.

Chat even when your friends are offline
Chatting in Gmail just keeps getting better. Now, if you’re chatting with a friend who goes offline, your friend will be able to see whatever you were typing the next time he or she goes online.

In other news, Yahoo is said they are going to include chat inside of their e-mail client…that’s soooooo February 2006…

Remember about 2 weeks ago when Yahoo! came out with Yahoo! Messenger for select blackberry companies? Well now it is avaliable for all blackberry users.

Head over to mobile.blackberry.com on your blackberry for an OTA download.

I have to say that they did it up right. I don’t know anyone I talk to on Yahoo! messenger. When can AOL come out with AIM for the Blackberry? The T-Mobile version pretty much sucks.

If there is a good AIM client that works as well as Yahoo! IM and Google Talk for the blackberry, I don’t ever see going back to the Sidekick (even when they do come out with the Sidekick 3).