Yahoo is the original Internet location. Back in the early days everyone had their Hotmail email address, and had Yahoo search directory set as their start page in Netscape Navigator. Things have changed drastically since then. Google is in the spotlight for search, and Yahoo has branched out to offer some important services for todays internet users, (insert Mozilla fan boy comment now) and we should all be using Firefox.

Taking a queue from Richard MacManus' post on the Top 10 Yahoo! Properties, we would like to highlight some of Yahoo's services that are making a difference in our lives in this Web 2.0 landscape.

Yesterday I wrote a bit about taming the RSS feeds generated by the myriad Web 2.0 services to which you're subscribed. It occurred to me that Emily Chang's original quest to pull together all of the feeds she creates into a single meta-feed was a perfect project for Yahoo! Pipes.

I sat down to take all the data I spew at places like my own blog, del.icio.us, Twitter, and Flickr into one aggregated bowl of RSS love. The result of my feed union isn't an hour by hour diary of my day, but does create an ephemeral stream of things that are undeniably me. The same techniques could easily be tweaked to document your day to near pinpoint perfection, if you're so inclined.

There has been lots of buzz around Yahoo and their newly launched Pipes beta. So what is it? Plain and simple, it's an interactive feed aggregator and manipulator. Pipes can be used to create RSS feeds that are a lot more useful and powerful than any other feed reader. Pipes is a Yahoo!-hosted service that enables the user to remix feeds that create data mashups with a visual approach. The Pipes tool allows users that have basically no skills or technical experience with web data to combine sources and develop new web services that they can share with others. With the tool, users connect pipe segments, like Yahoo! searches, Flickr feeds, and Google Base items, creating a complex application within minutes. Tutorials on how to use Pipes are currently not online, but are expected to be in a few days. There is a Yahoo! discussion forum open to users that wish to discuss Pipes with other early adopters. TechCrunch, GigaOM, and John Battelle all have blurbs about the service that you can check out.