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Those who know UNIX might know the use of pipes. Pipes are what make the shell scripts do their job. Think pipes. Think Feeds. Think mash-up. And think Yahoo!

The result is Yahoo! pipes.
Yahoo! pipes is a versatile method of filtering out unnecessary data from feeds and getting exactly what you want.

Yahoo! pipes works similar to UNIX pipes, to redirect output to different blocks/widgets sequentially and get a final format which the user wants. But the best part is, there is no coding involved. Any amateur user can use the pipes to get a personalized feed. It is so simple. Just drag and drop filters, give the proper parameters in each, and connect each through pipes.

Check the following pipe for instance. I create a Fetch block and give my feed URL. Then I pipe it to a Filter block which will filter it based on a simple rule - Select all the entries which have category "Stories". It is then connected to "Pipe output".
The result is a feed which has only those entries with category "Stories", filtered out from the original feed.

This is just a simple application. There are a myriad of possible ways you can create a mash-up. Heaven is the limit to the number of smart ways you can customize your feeds.

You can even give query strings and get the output as feeds. You have the option of getting RSS or JSON feeds.

THE VERDICT
Feeds have already been making news as an excellent way of representing data. Pipes just made it better. As I said, heaven is the limit. We can expect some new hacks for Blogger too which uses Yahoo! pipes.

FURTHER READING
1. Pipes to the rescue! - Aditya
2. Pipes and filters for the internet - O'Reilly

UPDATE
1. There is a bug in Yahoo! pipes currently which results in published date field to be blank in the feed. Ramani has mentioned this to the "Pipes Suggestion Board". It is important that we get this bug out of the way. So please vote for his feedback. Ramani reckons that Yahoo! is not like the Blogger Support; they are very responsive. :)
This problem is fixed by Yahoo!