(Mash that site up!)³

We are all wondering how the future of of online distribution will look like. Well, I think that now we can get a much clearer picture by having a look at Yahoo! Pipes.

Pipes is an interactive feed aggregator and manipulator. Using Pipes, users (with a little programming expertise) can easily create feeds that are powerful, useful and relevant by mashing up different sources, applying personal search filtering options and basically aggregating content in a very intuitive and customizable way. Not only pipes allows you to create your own mash up, but to access to others’users pipes, clone and modify them, in a open-source logic.

Quoting from O’Really Radar

“Yahoo!’s new Pipes service is a milestone in the history of the internet. It’s a service that generalizes the idea of the mashup, providing a drag and drop editor that allows you to connect internet data sources, process them, and redirect the output…While it’s still a bit rough around the edges, it has enormous promise in turning the web into a programmable environment for everyone”

Open-source platforms like Pipes will put more and more the technological keys of distribution into the hand of consumers, who will be able to determine themselves that a given source of – let’s say – hotel inventory can be matched with some other personal sources of editorial, mapping or photographic content…all resulting in a customized ranking of search results. Just imagine the array of personal websites that could be powered by personal Pipes, each of them providing travel options and contents as real-time aggreation of endless sources.

Hoteliers and travel suppliers in general have already gone throught the shock of handing out the control over their inventory to players who are stronger in global online distribution… it will be interesting to see what happens if the aggregators (OTAs and metasearch engines) start to get aggregated.