Yep, they should have called it Yahoo Tubes, Ted. Nonetheless, Yahoo just went live with Yahoo Pipes, a service that allows you to create your own mashups.
Pipes provides a drag and drop editor that lets you find data sources, mix them up and spit them out - in short, a way to combine feeds in different ways. Examples include an NYTimes-Flickr mashup that matches NYTimes headlines to relevant images, and an aggregated news alert of Yahoo, Google, MSN, Findory, Bloglines and Technorati. The service is social, in the sense that you can have an avatar, view all the mashups from a certain user and even edit these existing mashups to create something new. The editor, in fact, is particularly slick: it's ajaxy, rather than Flash-powered, and represents actions with modules connected by lines.
Pipes is still a little geeky, admittedly, but it's a great first step in creating a mashup tool for the masses. Let us know if you create anything cool.
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