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Yahoo recently launched Yahoo Pipes, a service that allows users to interconnect different data sources, process them and redirect the output to create a powerful mashup feed, all by using a drag-and-drop editor.

The service has undergone a major upgrade yesterday and is now integrated with Yahoo Maps for graphical display of Pipes that contain GeoData. Some of the example pipes created using GeoData are:

• Apartment Near Something is a pipe that allows you to search for an apartment close to something like a park, school etc and plot the output on a map! (See snapshot below)
• Photos Near Napa Wineries annotates Yahoo! Local results for Napa Wineries with images from Flickr that were taken nearby.
• Socialight Flickrin’ takes location-based Sticky Notes from Socialight.com and searches for pictures from Flickr based on the content of the Sticky Note.

In addition to the map integration the pipes team has also added support for KML rendering of GeoData. KML is an abbreviation of Keyhole Markup Language, Keyhole was a company which Google acquired and offered its product as Google Earth. Until recently KML was a proprietary Google format but Google has now turned it into an open standard with OGC. Yahoo’s support for KML will ensure that Yahoo Pipes get indexed in Google’s geoindex, which is also good for Google as more data would ensure more accurate geo-targeting.

The Yahoo Pipes editor has also been enhanced to include inline editing of Title and Description listed on the runpage of pipes and have also added “before”, “after”, “n days ago” and “now” filters to accept dates in a variety of formats.

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