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I liked Yahoo! pipes and the idea of being able to glue things together on the internet, but unfortunately many web sites simply don't have good APIs to enable

I liked Yahoo! pipes and the idea of being able to glue things together on the internet, but unfortunately many web sites simply don't have good APIs to enable this. In my experience pipes workflows were also brittle since any site could easily break them. The lack of stable API support on (many/most) web sites (and no incentive to provide it), the likely low user/developer base, the apparent lack of killer apps, and Yahoo! itself probably all combined to prevent pipes from becoming a big thing.

mihaitodor 4y ago
At least some sites provide somewhat-stable and documented APIs nowadays... Definitely a far cry from what was being promised 15 years ago, but at least most of them moved away from SOAP. I guess it's still used in some places, unfortunately.
ehnto 4y ago
That was my takeaway after building API Blocks. The goal was to display arbitrary data from APIs on a dashboard. APIs just aren't standardized or stable enough, and it took too much effort to maintain the API library. The UX just wasn't up to scratch because almost every week a block on your dashboard would be broken because the API changed,or your auth expired or broke. The cost to maintain was not worth it. An interconnected public web as data would be incredible but we just haven't built that. Not to detract from the concept here with Benthos Studio, the use case is a bit different. But it is something to keep in mind, the end user might not be technical and APIs constantly changing might not be something they expected.
- dcsan 4y ago
  Smart contracts do provide a stable (immutable!) api which is designed for composable functionality, although it’s not used across different peoples contracts that much. A pipes like UI that binds things together could be interesting. If the connective contracts are also on chain you could in theory develop flash bots that execute everything in the same block.

mihaitodor 4y ago

At least some sites provide somewhat-stable and documented APIs nowadays... Definitely a far cry from what was being promised 15 years ago, but at least most of them moved away from SOAP. I guess it's still used in some places, unfortunately.

ehnto 4y ago

That was my takeaway after building API Blocks. The goal was to display arbitrary data from APIs on a dashboard. APIs just aren't standardized or stable enough, and it took too much effort to maintain the API library. The UX just wasn't up to scratch because almost every week a block on your dashboard would be broken because the API changed,or your auth expired or broke. The cost to maintain was not worth it. An interconnected public web as data would be incredible but we just haven't built that. Not to detract from the concept here with Benthos Studio, the use case is a bit different. But it is something to keep in mind, the end user might not be technical and APIs constantly changing might not be something they expected.

dcsan 4y ago
Smart contracts do provide a stable (immutable!) api which is designed for composable functionality, although it’s not used across different peoples contracts that much. A pipes like UI that binds things together could be interesting. If the connective contracts are also on chain you could in theory develop flash bots that execute everything in the same block.