Yahoo Pipes is a potentially interesting concept: a metadata mixer which you program via a drag-and-drop “flowchart” GUI, with little pipes to connect the boxes. Now, I say “potentially” because the concept is great, but the execution is still a bit buggy, especially where Flickr-based content and Content Analysis operators are concerned. Pipes are slow, and seem to fail quite frequently, and when they do work, image results are aggressively cached so you get the same stream of photos even days later. Output is shown as a conventional formatted text or graphic feed, without any venue to customize the stream with a template or CSS — which is a pity, since styling the output is half the fun of remixing the content. (Hence the perennial “Beta,” I suppose.)

Here are my first attempts at Pipes. Mostly it’s just Metafilter feed consolidation, and clones of other Pipes which run feeds through Content Analysis and replace the keywords with Flickr content.