Today, Yahoo is releasing a new service: Firehose, a real-time, searchable index of social content aggregated from around the web.

Accessible via YQL, Yahoo’s SQL-like query language, the Firehose will gather data from status updates, user ratings and reviews, comment threads, Google Buzz, Flickr,Delicious, Twitter, YouTube, Last.fm and a range of other sites and apps, as well. The Firehose is part of Yahoo’s family of Social APIs, a suite that includes APIs for contacts/directories as well as update/status data.

This announcement follows Yahoo’s recent integration with Twitter and is part of the company’s ongoing commitment to developers as well as its social media strategy, which seems to revolve around aggregating content and leveraging existing networks and APIs rather than reinventing the wheel à la Google Buzz.

YQL allows developers to access, update and mash up data from across the social web — any data source that uses open tables is fair game. With Firehose, developers can query for keywords, data from a specific web app, data in any given language or from a certain location, data on status changes or data about a given URL. Being able to easily grab and combine data from multiple sources is something that’s been an exciting part of Yahoo’s developer initiatives for a while and will likely continue to be part of the company’s strategy when it comes to web applications.

“The realtime web could be called the modern equivalent of Adam Smith’s invisible hand, organically guiding the web marketplace based on the seemingly chaotic click choices of millions of users,” wrote Yahoo Developer Platforms PM and UX Manager Micah Laaker in an e-mail today. “We believe the Updates Firehose will provide the tools necessary for [developers] to make structure and sense out of such an activity stream.”