8 ms·

Pipe Dreams: The life and times of Yahoo Pipes

398 points by type0 3y ago

happytoexplain 3y ago
I used Pipes to get a feed of specific categories of used video games and game systems from Craigslist in college and beyond. I got a lot of stuff that way, and visited many parts of the cities I lived in that I otherwise wouldn't have.
- Scoundreller 3y ago
  For resale or collection? I used to hit up our local vintage store (next to my high school) and pick up all the donated NESs and games to resell on eBay (probably back to the people who's parents donated that old useless junk...)
  - happytoexplain 3y ago
    Collection. I just loved having a physical library of good-condition boxed games from the era of my childhood.
djoshea 3y ago
I used pipes back in college to randomize our roommate ordering in picking dorm rooms. I had it take the top headline on The NY Times website, hash it, and pull out numbers from 1-6 in a deterministic way. It was the best way I could think of to do it from afar over the summer, and convince everyone it was fair without needing to run code ourselves. It was useful and fun to use!
hackhunter 3y ago
Is it still useful today? I skipped the rss time.
- cja 3y ago
  RSS is how I read websites. It's still RSS time
  - Aloha 3y ago
    With the unwinding of twitter, RSS has become invaluable to me as a replacement.
- edpichler 3y ago
  Very much. It saves you a lot of time.
psadri 3y ago
Kudos to the retool design team and Glenn on a really nice execution of this story. The Pipes inspired illustrations are gold.
- solardev 3y ago
  Does it work smoothly for you? It's so laggy on my phone I can't even read the first post it
  - iamthejuan 3y ago
    Works fine on Poco F3.
  - magicalhippo 3y ago
    I wouldn't call it smooth, but certainly servicable on my Firefox for Android, Samsung S21.
  - edpichler 3y ago
    Here (Win 11 and Brave) it is very smooth but it seems many people are complaining.
- glennfle 3y ago
  Thank you for your time and patience with this! I am so glad that one of my favorite services ever now has its story told.
aworks 3y ago
Just this week, I was thinking if I could recreate my use of Pipes... From each track in the RSS feed of tracks scrobbled on last.fm, do a google search and pipe the output back to an RSS feed into my reader. Neither chatGPT nor Google could make sense of my request. Any ideas?
- DaiPlusPlus 3y ago
  I'd fire-up Linqpad, load-in a NuGet package for RSS feed parsing, then do something like `SomeRssLib.LoadFrom( "https://last.fm/yourfeed.rss https://last.fm/yourfeed.rss" ).Select( async e => httpClient.GetAsync( "https://google.com/search?q= https://google.com/search?q=" + Uri.EscapeDataString( e["track_title"] ) ) ).StringJoin( resultHtml => "some quick-and-dirty-XML-string-concat-here" ).SomePostfixApplyExt( result => File.WriteAllText( "output.rss", result )`. ...something like that?
- viraptor 3y ago
  If you need only that, it may be easiest to write a few lines of python/js and run it yourself or through some serverless offering. If you have more workflows to do, n8n.io may be useful.
m-a-r-c-e-l 3y ago
Yahoo Pipes was the spiritual father of Node RED
- vincnetas 3y ago
  :) Reminded me that i still have node red spinning on my home server handling automations. Without any upgrades for... forever Integrating IKEA five button remote with Sonos speaker.
ChrisArchitect 3y ago
Pipes was awesome for sure. It fit so nicely into a golden web 2.0 era sort of period where there was still loose open interoperability thanks to prevalent RSS and similar tech. Effective at cobbling together simple things to make simply useful things. What's with this epic design and work put into this deep dive tho? What an effort from Retool. Suppose maybe just wondering why they didn't do it earlier! Ha
underbluewaters 3y ago
Web 2.0 times were great. It was just taken as a given that the future was open standards, interoperable web services, and creative tools like Pipes that let users and developers easily leverage them. Social media and the drive to monetize users at all costs destroyed that potential.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- keepamovin 3y ago
  Yeah, I don't know why this hasn't become a thing. There seems to be so much "Latent value" locked up in the semistructured data (in HTML format but not in machine readable format) that could be unlocked via crowdsourcing with the right tool. That's what I want to build. I just think there's so much value in harnessing that. The interoperability you can enable of bringing data out of silos, and mashing up actions and values from different contexts...I mean, we need existing web content to be part of web authoring in a first class way.
chrisallick 3y ago
wow. what a great mobile read xp to match a great story. reminds of reading "in the beginning was the command line."
- ftigis 3y ago
  Not great for me. Getting single digit fps/absymal scroll performance here on my M1 Pro MBP and iPhone.
  - chrisallick 3y ago
    bummer. flawless on my iphone. go into reader mode, its still a great read.
  - lrx 3y ago
    Yeah, something is wrong with your setup.
    - lelandbatey 3y ago
      Pixel Pro 7, also 2 fps in both Chrome and Firefox. I don't think it's a "just them" thing I think it's just not working well for many people.
  - solardev 3y ago
    Same here, totally unusable on Pixel 7
  - Klonoar 3y ago
    Weird, worked totally fine on my M1 Pro MBP.
iancmceachern 3y ago
I was just telling someone about this. Good old days.
zeristor 3y ago
It took me a while to realise that AWS Steps is like Yahoo Pipes. It isn’t as simple, and there aren’t as many clickable components, but it was weird that I was so slow to realise it. I guess someone with more insight can point out where I’m wrong.
- big_paps 3y ago
  Never heard of it. Will try this out.
big_paps 3y ago
I used this service quite a bit in combination with drupal 5, shortly before it shut down. So 1.5 decades ago you could build quite large systems just by clicking stuff together.
padolsey 3y ago
I miss Yahoo Pipes so much. And YQL. In 2009 I implemented an effectively cross-domain XHR (ajax) plugin on top of jQuery so I could grab random webpages on the client-side and query them via CSS selectors (converted to XPath). YQL would give me JSONP back so it all felt quite magical. Ah the old days...
- Guillaume86 3y ago
  Yes pipes could be used as a CORS proxy, I built a full Spotify like app client side with jquery at the time, searching/streaming mp3s at radioblogclub and VK.com and fetching metadata/similar recommendations from last.fm etc...
  - pests 3y ago
    Ah man, the open web we were promised. I miss these days of mashing up multiple services and just the general free for all. Can't do anything without an API key these days.
    - keepamovin 3y ago
      I too share dreams of that open web and want to re-create it. The first JS book I saw was the classic DHTML book with an attractive cover (can't find it now) in 2002 at Kinokuniya in Sydney. Good times. i'm building a dev API on top of https://github.com/BrowserBox/BrowserBox https://github.com/BrowserBox/BrowserBox that should provide the same functionality as a CORS-proxy / unrestricted iframe to be able to embed and interact with content across origins.
      - pests 3y ago
        Ha, I bet we're similar age. I haven't heard the term DHTML in so long. Hows AJAX holding up these days? Then long polling aka Comet? Thankfully we've always embraced puns in tech.
        keepamovin 3y ago
solardev 3y ago
That is the laggiest animation I've ever seen :( Totally unusable (Chrome on Android, Pixel 7). Is there a text version?
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- happymellon 3y ago
  I wondered whether my page had crashed. I couldn't get anything to work.
- shadycuz 3y ago
  Interesting, worked fine for me. Also using chrome on Pixel 7.
- blueboo 3y ago
  Laggily zooms a bit…then breaks on iOS becoming a big scrollable white page. I bet when it works the animation is kind of neat. So much work to bounce your readers, pity!
- FirmwareBurner 3y ago
  Could be because the Pixel 7 GPU is quite weak even though it's not an alle phone so heavy Websites can bring it to its knees.
  - xattt 3y ago
    A text story should not bring a phone to its knees.
  - solardev 3y ago
    What's an alle phone? I've never seen the phone lag on any other website. Hell, my Pixel 1 or Nexus phones didn't have issues either. I've never seen lag like this on any website, period... I don't think it's a GPU thing. Probably there is some condition that makes it really laggy on some devices and not others. Hmm.
- 3y ago
solardev 3y ago
These days there's stuff like Make.com (formerly Integromat), IFTTT, Zapier, etc. to do some low code piping. Airtable also got automation and pipeline support. Still miss Pipes though. It was awesome!
onli 3y ago
When Pipes died I saw all the comments and wondered why no one built a successor project. When after a few years that still hadn't happened, and after an idea on how to get it to work had popped into my head, I built it myself: https://github.com/pipes-digital/pipes https://github.com/pipes-digital/pipes is the source code and https://www.pipes.digital/ https://www.pipes.digital/ a hosted version. To call it a successor project is maybe arrogant and misleading - it can not do half of what the Yahoo project did, and is sorely missing time and work from my side to make it into what it should be. But if you are nostalgic for the concept and especially if you just want to filter or combine a few RSS feeds, or create one for a HTML page that is missing one, it's worth a try I still think. I personally use it regularly to get specific YouTube videos from a few channels that have many other videos I do not care about. The article mentions one of the big problems for this kind of project: The APIs are missing or not open anymore. For example, a comment here mentions doing a google search for a song title and putting this in a feed - but you can't realistically parse Google. So you have to use the API, which I didn't know existed until looking it up now, and calculate the price tag attached to it very carefully. Maybe it would be a realistic integration to provide with a different search engine. Or a bigger project should run of the local search engines for the pipes block. The article is also right in that there is a lot of influence of Pipes in different projects. I was always wondering why that influence was often so little - to react to output on a page in a wizard for example, instead of having blocks. I think I understand that a little bit better now - it is really a strange abstraction level. You are working with a flow of structured data, without necessarily having the correct data structure for that, and then that needs to be transformed somehow. The idea that you might have JSON on a page somewhere you want to extract and manipulate, but then that data is inside of your outer feed format - it feels wrong to confront the user with these details, it makes sure the target groups is developers, but it also does not seem like something that can be reasonably universally solved. But maybe I'm wrong here, and this is more a problem with my implementation (where RSS is piped from block to block) than with the concept itself. The idea of a real Pipes 2 is very exciting to me though. Give it some initial funding, built all of the modern APIs into it that can be added (and in doubt just give users the option to use their own API keys) - especially things like ChatGPT, after all those LLMs are great in converting structured data - solve the data format question and crucially keep the interface block based (but maybe built with something like Flutter, so it can be better). Could work, not to win the world, but as something that can justify its existence next to ifttt and zapier. At least I regularly get the impression that the concept still fascinates people a lot, though their specific use case is very often very specialized and then often enough not something my small pipes project can cover. But if it were broader...
ram_rar 3y ago
This brings back soo many old memories of mine @ Yahoo! . We had soo many tooling - YTS, YCS benchmarks, Vespa, SherpaDb, Pipes, shimproxy the list goes on. Its unfortunate leadership didn't have the foresight to saasify them in a way AWS did. Tooling at Yahoo!! was soo ahead of its time.
- winrid 3y ago
  what was SherpaDb?
  - ywain 3y ago
    Presumably this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo_Sherpa https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo_Sherpa
sourcecodeplz 3y ago
I almost wrote my thesis on a system using Pipes, until my professor changed his mind and I did something else. Good times.
ranting-moth 3y ago
I have no idea how to use this website, but if anyone wants to read up on pipes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo!_Pipes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo!_Pipes
prepend 3y ago
My favorite “project awareness” technique for work was through pipes and I’ve never had something as quick as way back then. I had a yahoo pipe that combined and deduped about 10-15 jira projects and about 30-50 GitHub commit streams into a single rss feed that I read through google reader. It was glorious because it let me know quickly who changed what and when and where. And it was rss so I didn’t have to search through email or look at multiple notification pages.
ricklamers 3y ago
I have to plug one of my favorite workflow automation tools that is a namesake and was fairly recently developed: https://pipedream.com/ https://pipedream.com/ Would definitely give it a try if you’re looking to automate Yahoo Pipes style. I have no affiliation to them, just a happy user
- Hortinstein 3y ago
  Just signed up this seems like it will replace some docker containers I have running on a free tier of fly.io dumping into a supabase free tier. Very cool thank you for sharing!
- ewuhic 3y ago
  Can I self-host it?
  - ricklamers 3y ago
    https://github.com/PipedreamHQ/pipedream/issues/954 https://github.com/PipedreamHQ/pipedream/issues/954 No I don’t think so. You probably want n8n if you’re keen on self-hosting.
    - pomatic 3y ago
      N8N is closed source though, which is a shame because it means we end users can't fix any of the copious quantity of bugs...
- ngoldbaum 3y ago
  The owner, tod sacerdoti, is using it to scrape top stories from lobste.rs and submit them to HN as a karma arbitrage pump. Search todsacerdoti on https://gerikson.com/hnlo/ https://gerikson.com/hnlo/ to see what I’m talking about. Judging by the amount of HN karma he’s accumulated it seems to work very well.
  - ricklamers 3y ago
    TIL. Cross-posting breaks silos
JustinGoldberg9 3y ago
I miss the internet circa 2013. I had a blog, and twitter would fetch content from the blog feed and automatically post it. Simple and elegant. Pipes is dead, at least we still have ifttt.
leemailll 3y ago
I love Pipes, I also think it is the last best thing from yahoo
emmanueloga_ 3y ago
I’m interested in how an article like this comes to be. I can tell that it was made with a lot of care and I’m sure it took a while to polish to the final result (high quality content + polish = high cost). I’m still not sure what’s the purpose, it doesn’t seem to be a marketing piece, although the underlying message is clear between the lines: if you liked pipes, you’ll like retool. Or something along those lines.
- webel0 3y ago
  I am still reading but have the exact same question. The production value is high. The url is simply “retool.com/pipes” (I.e. not just another blog).
  - glennfle 3y ago
    Author of the story here! I've been a writer and journalist for nearly 30 years, and with the giant shift of advertising from traditional and then web publications to apps, social networks, and product sites (Amazon makes a fortune from ads), the number of places that publish long-form features has shrunk quite a bit. The ones that remain often have a tech billionaire or heir helping to fund them or they're the last survivors. I can't speak for Retool, of course, but it was pitched to me by my fabulous editor there as the company wanting to show the great visual editing tools of the past and make sure they weren't forgotten. They had already run a wildly fascinating story about Visual Basic, something I never thought I would be interested in, and it was riveting. There was no marketing involvement in the story at all. There's an interesting line where producing compelling editorial work shines a nice light on what you're doing as a company? Stripe published Increment for years, both online and in a very lovely print edition, and I wrote (for the same editor) for years for them until that no longer served Stripe's particular purpose for it. But it was all essentially independent editorial with nothing to do with Stripe's core mission. On the production side, I didn't see much of how it would look until it went live, and I think it tells an incredibly robust story—it's a great parallel to my reporting in a way that I've rarely seen in my whole career?!
    - emmanueloga_ 3y ago
majestic5762 3y ago
Yahoo Pipes was full of XSS vulns. I used to play with cookie grabbers
thedougd 3y ago
The best part of Pipes was that no one blocked it or it was difficult to block. I used it to scrape data from web pages that I served up via Android widget apps.
pythonbase 3y ago
I had my first taste of "automation" with Yahoo Pipes - scraping sites, generating alerts etc. Did a lot of workflows back in the day.
hermitcrab 3y ago
I never used Yahoo Pipes. Was it primarily for automating for manipulating stuff grabbed from the web. Or could you also usefully use it to wrangle/ETL local data files and databases?
- Glench 3y ago
  Mostly web stuff. See also this great piece about Yahoo Pipes called "My Heart Feeds a Series of Tubes": https://medium.com/message/my-heart-feeds-a-series-of-tubes-de78858ddfc8 https://medium.com/message/my-heart-feeds-a-series-of-tubes-...
newsclues 3y ago
I thought this was going to be about https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pipe_Mania https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pipe_Mania
Glench 3y ago
If you're more handy with code, I'd also recommend checking out https://val.town https://val.town which lets you quickly create automations and endpoints.
- stevekrouse 3y ago
  Thanks! Founder of Val Town here :) I actually was notified of this comment because I "follow" Glen on HN via this val: https://www.val.town/v/rodrigotello/hnFollow https://www.val.town/v/rodrigotello/hnFollow
g051051 3y ago
Congrats to the authors for taking a potentially great article and wrecking it with insane distractions and useless web BS. Pipes was an amazing piece of software and deserves better than that.
ksec 3y ago
Everytime I see Yahoo Pipes I remember the video [1] from Tom Scott about programming. ( The video title view count is updated in as close to real time as possible ) [1] This Video Has 69,187,812 Views https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BxV14h0kFs0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BxV14h0kFs0 A lot of what I thought were good, accessible, productive, entry to middle level technology ( HyperCards. Yahoo Pipes. Flash, Delphi etc ) never gained enough market. They were all the sort of middle ground good enough options. Instead technology is often filtered from the top end extreme. So everyone tries to use what Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft are using. Because those tools are deemed as what Professional should use. The only rare exception that is powering most of the word is Microsoft Excel.
zubairq 3y ago
Great article by Retool! Yep, Pipes was something different a the time!
danieldrehmer 3y ago
When people believed the internet was a series of tubes
nathanwallace 3y ago
Readers may enjoy Flowpipe [1], an open source cloud scripting engine we launched this week. It allows creation of pipelines in HCL to connect HTTP queries, run containers, execute lambda-compatible functions, query databases, etc all from your own machine / CLI. It can also be combined with Steampie[2], our open source project to query cloud resources (139+ plugins) with SQL. We're more DevOps focused, but Yahoo Pipes was part of the inspiration for our naming of these "pipes" :-) 1 - https://github.com/turbot/flowpipe https://github.com/turbot/flowpipe 2 - https://github.com/turbot/steampipe https://github.com/turbot/steampipe
- john-tells-all 3y ago
  I love Steampipe: it gives a simple and clear way to get feedback on many cloud resources. "select * from cloud" is a good synopsis. I'll check out Flowpipe!
  - nathanwallace 3y ago
    Thanks for your kind words - so great to hear that :-). We're really excited about Flowpipe and think it makes "cloud scripting" really fun & easy through pipelines - please let us know how you go and what we can improve!
codepoet80 3y ago
[flagged]
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
donatj 3y ago
I loved Yahoo Pipes. I had so many pipes set up to filter RSS feeds and Podcasts down to just the types of content I cared about. Insanely useful, I miss it so much. A big example, I listen to a podcast where they have standard episodes and episodes where they play D&D and I just don’t care about the D&D ones so it was really nice to be able to filter them out.
- charles_f 3y ago
  Fun, that was also my primary use case for pipes. That and making title-only rss into full text rss
- crtasm 3y ago
  I use Handy Reading on f-droid/android and hide various things from feeds based on their title/category. Wonder if it could pass on a filtered feed to a podcast app somehow.
freediver 3y ago
Proud Pipes user. Does the web need something like this today and in what form? All the replacements that are offered pale in comparison to excitement it was to use Pipes 15 years ago. Are we simply past that point?
- troyvit 3y ago
  I skipped to chapter 9 in the article ("Clogged"), and it looked like Pipes failed because it didn't have a large enough team or a well-defined mission. As a result they couldn't offer a super robust product that would lure in enterprise users. "You could not purchase some number of guaranteed-to-work Pipes calls per month" is the quote from the article. The reason I think that interesting is because that's the model these days for everything from AI tokens to Monday.com seats. It makes me feel like Pipes was before its time. That said I've been collecting different "business glue" products that are similar to Pipes. To me, like you say, they aren't as interesting, exciting and intuitive as Pipes was, but maybe it just takes a little more digging. I tried to focus on open source tools but some aren't. - n8n io: https://n8n.io/integrations/mondaycom/ https://n8n.io/integrations/mondaycom/ - Node-RED: https://nodered.org/ https://nodered.org/ (just read about this one in this thread) - trigger dev: trigger.dev - automatisch.io: https://automatisch.io/docs/ https://automatisch.io/docs/ - Activepieces: https://www.activepieces.com/docs/getting-started/introduction https://www.activepieces.com/docs/getting-started/introducti... - Huginn: https://github.com/huginn/huginn https://github.com/huginn/huginn - budibase: https://budibase.com/ https://budibase.com/ - windmill: https://www.windmill.dev/ https://www.windmill.dev/ - tooljet: https://www.tooljet.com/workflows https://www.tooljet.com/workflows - Bracket: https://www.usebracket.com/pricing https://www.usebracket.com/pricing (just SalesForce <-> PostgreSQL) - Zapier: zapier.com/ Anyway I hope some of these are fun!
  - Towaway69 3y ago
    Big Node-RED fan here. For me it has the perfect combination between visual flow based programming[0] and textual coding. It makes a great effort in making visual programming incredible efficient. Node-RED does great job in implementing the ideas of FBP in visual manner. [0] = https://jpaulm.github.io/fbp/ https://jpaulm.github.io/fbp/
kossTKR 3y ago
I feel like theres a potential for B2B solutions in this space. Especially for workers who want to bootstrap something quick, avoid something like Teams or other behemoths, create something for a one time survey, campaign, shorter process etc. So much was lost transitioning from web 2.0 to whatever walled dystopian garbage we have now. The concept of pipes are way back from the Unix days, and the idea of this modularity and later building stuff from a flow based interface like this somehow never translated into anything on the frontend side. I've been met with simple specs that had to be built with custom web solutions a few times now where i've almost started building a generalised model like this that could scale because most apps could be defined like this, as entities related with filters between them in sequences related to each other and web views where people could interact. The closest i found back then was something like Airtable/Zapier combinations that was extremely limited.
RyLuke 3y ago
(Hi, Retool employee here who worked on this piece.) This is the second installment[1] in what we hope will be a regular series telling the stories of novel programming environments that had a lot of influence on developers. Creating these is a labor of love—we get to talk to the original teams who built products that were formational for us. We have an incredible in-house creative team that finds a way to sneak these fun mini-sites in amongst their other work. For me, the most exciting part of working on a product like Retool is that it's an evolution of lot of ideas from the past. We're always looking at prior art to spark ideas and challenge our assumptions as we're building. There are many great ideas in old computing papers and products that were either before their time, or lost when there were major shifts in the industry. Pipes was a touchpoint for us as we built out one of our newer products[2]. We have lots of ideas for future installments in this series, but if you have any programming environments that were near and dear to you heart, let me know! [1] Our first deep-dive was on Visual Basic. I'm very biased (I wrote it!), but if you like Glenn's Pipes piece, you'll probably enjoy this one too. :) https://retool.com/visual-basic https://retool.com/visual-basic [2] Retool Workflows: https://retool.com/workflows https://retool.com/workflows
- apitman 3y ago
  Hi Ryan, I appreciate the artistic approach taken, but thought you might want to know the page barely works for me in Firefox 120 on Linux 6.6. Everything is very laggy and the scrolljacking is terrible. Chromium is much smoother but the scrolljacking is still bad. Generally speaking I don't think Linux is a target platform worth worrying too much about, but when it comes to programming-related content that might not be the case.
  - Lammy 3y ago
    Same here on Firefox 120 Win10, but I don't mind it on the rare occasion such as this where it's half art project half write-up. If it were every article it would get tiresome.
  - mikestew 3y ago
    Generally speaking I don't think Linux is a target platform Maybe, but you’d think an iOS iPad might be a target. I just closed the tab, as there’s no reader view, and the janky scrolling and waiting for text to load (text!) wasn’t worth the effort.
julianeon 3y ago
I think you could make the case that Zapier is the monetized version of Pipes. It's a 5 billion dollar company now.
donnellyp 3y ago
i have a few (new, unworn) pipes tshirts left. mostly XL thou. and a ton of pipes stickers.
- apitman 3y ago
  Are you selling them?
- kentbrew 3y ago
  Um, yes please! @xoxo.zone@kentbrew
Towaway69 3y ago
For anyone interested in visual programming, I would recommend having a look at Flow Based Programming[0] better known for being the inspiration for Unix pipes, which in turn were name giver for pipes in yahoo pipes. [0]=https://jpaulm.github.io/fbp/ https://jpaulm.github.io/fbp/
pazimzadeh 3y ago
Another amazing node-based app that was deprecated is Quartz Composer on Mac. It was extended by Mike Matas' team when he was at Facebook: https://medium.com/the-year-of-the-looking-glass/introducing-origami-for-quartz-composer-f1173d0bd181 https://medium.com/the-year-of-the-looking-glass/introducing... although this was also later deprecated in favor of Origami Studio, which retains the node-based UI: https://origami.design/ https://origami.design/
Lammy 3y ago
I 'member it used to be a thing to blogspam AdSense with Y! Pipes via RSS subscriptions to source sites → translate to non-English language → translate back to English → auto-post to AdSense-encumbered Wordpress blog.
brundolf 3y ago
Hmm this has my gears turning These days there's an abundance of public APIs that serve up various public information. What if you took a bunch of those, wrapped them up in a single typed SDK in TS or Python (using their existing SDKs if they exist), under a consistent devex, and just made it really easy to playfully string together different datasets
- didip 3y ago
  Zapier already took the Pipes idea into a startup.
bosky101 3y ago
I was the organizer of the first pipesCamp[1], in a sleepy town in india. What were we thinking! Ha. Fun times. We did get coverage. It truly was a powerful product, and I hat-tip all the wonderful folks at Yahoo involved. https://web.archive.org/web/20080312062739/http://developer.yahoo.net/blog/archives/2008/01/first-ever_pipescamp_unconference.html#comments https://web.archive.org/web/20080312062739/http://developer....

398 points by type0 3y ago

I used Pipes to get a feed of specific categories of used video games and game systems from Craigslist in college and beyond. I got a lot of stuff that way, and visited many parts of the cities I lived in that I otherwise wouldn't have.

Scoundreller 3y ago
For resale or collection? I used to hit up our local vintage store (next to my high school) and pick up all the donated NESs and games to resell on eBay (probably back to the people who's parents donated that old useless junk...)
- happytoexplain 3y ago
  Collection. I just loved having a physical library of good-condition boxed games from the era of my childhood.

djoshea 3y ago

I used pipes back in college to randomize our roommate ordering in picking dorm rooms. I had it take the top headline on The NY Times website, hash it, and pull out numbers from 1-6 in a deterministic way. It was the best way I could think of to do it from afar over the summer, and convince everyone it was fair without needing to run code ourselves. It was useful and fun to use!

hackhunter 3y ago

Is it still useful today? I skipped the rss time.

cja 3y ago
RSS is how I read websites. It's still RSS time
- Aloha 3y ago
  With the unwinding of twitter, RSS has become invaluable to me as a replacement.
edpichler 3y ago
Very much. It saves you a lot of time.

psadri 3y ago

Kudos to the retool design team and Glenn on a really nice execution of this story. The Pipes inspired illustrations are gold.

solardev 3y ago
Does it work smoothly for you? It's so laggy on my phone I can't even read the first post it
- iamthejuan 3y ago
  Works fine on Poco F3.
- magicalhippo 3y ago
  I wouldn't call it smooth, but certainly servicable on my Firefox for Android, Samsung S21.
- edpichler 3y ago
  Here (Win 11 and Brave) it is very smooth but it seems many people are complaining.
glennfle 3y ago
Thank you for your time and patience with this! I am so glad that one of my favorite services ever now has its story told.

aworks 3y ago

Just this week, I was thinking if I could recreate my use of Pipes... From each track in the RSS feed of tracks scrobbled on last.fm, do a google search and pipe the output back to an RSS feed into my reader. Neither chatGPT nor Google could make sense of my request. Any ideas?

DaiPlusPlus 3y ago
I'd fire-up Linqpad, load-in a NuGet package for RSS feed parsing, then do something like `SomeRssLib.LoadFrom( "https://last.fm/yourfeed.rss https://last.fm/yourfeed.rss" ).Select( async e => httpClient.GetAsync( "https://google.com/search?q= https://google.com/search?q=" + Uri.EscapeDataString( e["track_title"] ) ) ).StringJoin( resultHtml => "some quick-and-dirty-XML-string-concat-here" ).SomePostfixApplyExt( result => File.WriteAllText( "output.rss", result )`. ...something like that?
viraptor 3y ago
If you need only that, it may be easiest to write a few lines of python/js and run it yourself or through some serverless offering. If you have more workflows to do, n8n.io may be useful.

m-a-r-c-e-l 3y ago

Yahoo Pipes was the spiritual father of Node RED

vincnetas 3y ago
:) Reminded me that i still have node red spinning on my home server handling automations. Without any upgrades for... forever Integrating IKEA five button remote with Sonos speaker.

ChrisArchitect 3y ago

Pipes was awesome for sure. It fit so nicely into a golden web 2.0 era sort of period where there was still loose open interoperability thanks to prevalent RSS and similar tech. Effective at cobbling together simple things to make simply useful things. What's with this epic design and work put into this deep dive tho? What an effort from Retool. Suppose maybe just wondering why they didn't do it earlier! Ha

underbluewaters 3y ago

Web 2.0 times were great. It was just taken as a given that the future was open standards, interoperable web services, and creative tools like Pipes that let users and developers easily leverage them. Social media and the drive to monetize users at all costs destroyed that potential.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
keepamovin 3y ago
Yeah, I don't know why this hasn't become a thing. There seems to be so much "Latent value" locked up in the semistructured data (in HTML format but not in machine readable format) that could be unlocked via crowdsourcing with the right tool. That's what I want to build. I just think there's so much value in harnessing that. The interoperability you can enable of bringing data out of silos, and mashing up actions and values from different contexts...I mean, we need existing web content to be part of web authoring in a first class way.

chrisallick 3y ago

wow. what a great mobile read xp to match a great story. reminds of reading "in the beginning was the command line."

ftigis 3y ago
Not great for me. Getting single digit fps/absymal scroll performance here on my M1 Pro MBP and iPhone.
- chrisallick 3y ago
  bummer. flawless on my iphone. go into reader mode, its still a great read.
- lrx 3y ago
  Yeah, something is wrong with your setup.
  - lelandbatey 3y ago
    Pixel Pro 7, also 2 fps in both Chrome and Firefox. I don't think it's a "just them" thing I think it's just not working well for many people.
- solardev 3y ago
  Same here, totally unusable on Pixel 7
- Klonoar 3y ago
  Weird, worked totally fine on my M1 Pro MBP.

iancmceachern 3y ago

I was just telling someone about this. Good old days.

zeristor 3y ago

It took me a while to realise that AWS Steps is like Yahoo Pipes. It isn’t as simple, and there aren’t as many clickable components, but it was weird that I was so slow to realise it. I guess someone with more insight can point out where I’m wrong.

big_paps 3y ago
Never heard of it. Will try this out.

big_paps 3y ago

I used this service quite a bit in combination with drupal 5, shortly before it shut down. So 1.5 decades ago you could build quite large systems just by clicking stuff together.

padolsey 3y ago

I miss Yahoo Pipes so much. And YQL. In 2009 I implemented an effectively cross-domain XHR (ajax) plugin on top of jQuery so I could grab random webpages on the client-side and query them via CSS selectors (converted to XPath). YQL would give me JSONP back so it all felt quite magical. Ah the old days...

Guillaume86 3y ago
Yes pipes could be used as a CORS proxy, I built a full Spotify like app client side with jquery at the time, searching/streaming mp3s at radioblogclub and VK.com and fetching metadata/similar recommendations from last.fm etc...
- pests 3y ago
  Ah man, the open web we were promised. I miss these days of mashing up multiple services and just the general free for all. Can't do anything without an API key these days.
  - keepamovin 3y ago
    I too share dreams of that open web and want to re-create it. The first JS book I saw was the classic DHTML book with an attractive cover (can't find it now) in 2002 at Kinokuniya in Sydney. Good times. i'm building a dev API on top of https://github.com/BrowserBox/BrowserBox https://github.com/BrowserBox/BrowserBox that should provide the same functionality as a CORS-proxy / unrestricted iframe to be able to embed and interact with content across origins.
    - pests 3y ago
      Ha, I bet we're similar age. I haven't heard the term DHTML in so long. Hows AJAX holding up these days? Then long polling aka Comet? Thankfully we've always embraced puns in tech.
      - keepamovin 3y ago

solardev 3y ago

That is the laggiest animation I've ever seen :( Totally unusable (Chrome on Android, Pixel 7). Is there a text version?

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
happymellon 3y ago
I wondered whether my page had crashed. I couldn't get anything to work.
shadycuz 3y ago
Interesting, worked fine for me. Also using chrome on Pixel 7.
blueboo 3y ago
Laggily zooms a bit…then breaks on iOS becoming a big scrollable white page. I bet when it works the animation is kind of neat. So much work to bounce your readers, pity!
FirmwareBurner 3y ago
Could be because the Pixel 7 GPU is quite weak even though it's not an alle phone so heavy Websites can bring it to its knees.
- xattt 3y ago
  A text story should not bring a phone to its knees.
- solardev 3y ago
  What's an alle phone? I've never seen the phone lag on any other website. Hell, my Pixel 1 or Nexus phones didn't have issues either. I've never seen lag like this on any website, period... I don't think it's a GPU thing. Probably there is some condition that makes it really laggy on some devices and not others. Hmm.
3y ago

solardev 3y ago

These days there's stuff like Make.com (formerly Integromat), IFTTT, Zapier, etc. to do some low code piping. Airtable also got automation and pipeline support. Still miss Pipes though. It was awesome!

onli 3y ago

When Pipes died I saw all the comments and wondered why no one built a successor project. When after a few years that still hadn't happened, and after an idea on how to get it to work had popped into my head, I built it myself: https://github.com/pipes-digital/pipes https://github.com/pipes-digital/pipes is the source code and https://www.pipes.digital/ https://www.pipes.digital/ a hosted version. To call it a successor project is maybe arrogant and misleading - it can not do half of what the Yahoo project did, and is sorely missing time and work from my side to make it into what it should be. But if you are nostalgic for the concept and especially if you just want to filter or combine a few RSS feeds, or create one for a HTML page that is missing one, it's worth a try I still think. I personally use it regularly to get specific YouTube videos from a few channels that have many other videos I do not care about. The article mentions one of the big problems for this kind of project: The APIs are missing or not open anymore. For example, a comment here mentions doing a google search for a song title and putting this in a feed - but you can't realistically parse Google. So you have to use the API, which I didn't know existed until looking it up now, and calculate the price tag attached to it very carefully. Maybe it would be a realistic integration to provide with a different search engine. Or a bigger project should run of the local search engines for the pipes block. The article is also right in that there is a lot of influence of Pipes in different projects. I was always wondering why that influence was often so little - to react to output on a page in a wizard for example, instead of having blocks. I think I understand that a little bit better now - it is really a strange abstraction level. You are working with a flow of structured data, without necessarily having the correct data structure for that, and then that needs to be transformed somehow. The idea that you might have JSON on a page somewhere you want to extract and manipulate, but then that data is inside of your outer feed format - it feels wrong to confront the user with these details, it makes sure the target groups is developers, but it also does not seem like something that can be reasonably universally solved. But maybe I'm wrong here, and this is more a problem with my implementation (where RSS is piped from block to block) than with the concept itself. The idea of a real Pipes 2 is very exciting to me though. Give it some initial funding, built all of the modern APIs into it that can be added (and in doubt just give users the option to use their own API keys) - especially things like ChatGPT, after all those LLMs are great in converting structured data - solve the data format question and crucially keep the interface block based (but maybe built with something like Flutter, so it can be better). Could work, not to win the world, but as something that can justify its existence next to ifttt and zapier. At least I regularly get the impression that the concept still fascinates people a lot, though their specific use case is very often very specialized and then often enough not something my small pipes project can cover. But if it were broader...

ram_rar 3y ago

This brings back soo many old memories of mine @ Yahoo! . We had soo many tooling - YTS, YCS benchmarks, Vespa, SherpaDb, Pipes, shimproxy the list goes on. Its unfortunate leadership didn't have the foresight to saasify them in a way AWS did. Tooling at Yahoo!! was soo ahead of its time.

winrid 3y ago
what was SherpaDb?
- ywain 3y ago
  Presumably this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo_Sherpa https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo_Sherpa

sourcecodeplz 3y ago

I almost wrote my thesis on a system using Pipes, until my professor changed his mind and I did something else. Good times.

ranting-moth 3y ago

I have no idea how to use this website, but if anyone wants to read up on pipes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo!_Pipes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo!_Pipes

prepend 3y ago

My favorite “project awareness” technique for work was through pipes and I’ve never had something as quick as way back then. I had a yahoo pipe that combined and deduped about 10-15 jira projects and about 30-50 GitHub commit streams into a single rss feed that I read through google reader. It was glorious because it let me know quickly who changed what and when and where. And it was rss so I didn’t have to search through email or look at multiple notification pages.

ricklamers 3y ago

I have to plug one of my favorite workflow automation tools that is a namesake and was fairly recently developed: https://pipedream.com/ https://pipedream.com/ Would definitely give it a try if you’re looking to automate Yahoo Pipes style. I have no affiliation to them, just a happy user

Hortinstein 3y ago
Just signed up this seems like it will replace some docker containers I have running on a free tier of fly.io dumping into a supabase free tier. Very cool thank you for sharing!
ewuhic 3y ago
Can I self-host it?
- ricklamers 3y ago
  https://github.com/PipedreamHQ/pipedream/issues/954 https://github.com/PipedreamHQ/pipedream/issues/954 No I don’t think so. You probably want n8n if you’re keen on self-hosting.
  - pomatic 3y ago
    N8N is closed source though, which is a shame because it means we end users can't fix any of the copious quantity of bugs...
ngoldbaum 3y ago
The owner, tod sacerdoti, is using it to scrape top stories from lobste.rs and submit them to HN as a karma arbitrage pump. Search todsacerdoti on https://gerikson.com/hnlo/ https://gerikson.com/hnlo/ to see what I’m talking about. Judging by the amount of HN karma he’s accumulated it seems to work very well.
- ricklamers 3y ago
  TIL. Cross-posting breaks silos

JustinGoldberg9 3y ago

I miss the internet circa 2013. I had a blog, and twitter would fetch content from the blog feed and automatically post it. Simple and elegant. Pipes is dead, at least we still have ifttt.

leemailll 3y ago

I love Pipes, I also think it is the last best thing from yahoo

emmanueloga_ 3y ago

I’m interested in how an article like this comes to be. I can tell that it was made with a lot of care and I’m sure it took a while to polish to the final result (high quality content + polish = high cost). I’m still not sure what’s the purpose, it doesn’t seem to be a marketing piece, although the underlying message is clear between the lines: if you liked pipes, you’ll like retool. Or something along those lines.

webel0 3y ago
I am still reading but have the exact same question. The production value is high. The url is simply “retool.com/pipes” (I.e. not just another blog).
- glennfle 3y ago
  Author of the story here! I've been a writer and journalist for nearly 30 years, and with the giant shift of advertising from traditional and then web publications to apps, social networks, and product sites (Amazon makes a fortune from ads), the number of places that publish long-form features has shrunk quite a bit. The ones that remain often have a tech billionaire or heir helping to fund them or they're the last survivors. I can't speak for Retool, of course, but it was pitched to me by my fabulous editor there as the company wanting to show the great visual editing tools of the past and make sure they weren't forgotten. They had already run a wildly fascinating story about Visual Basic, something I never thought I would be interested in, and it was riveting. There was no marketing involvement in the story at all. There's an interesting line where producing compelling editorial work shines a nice light on what you're doing as a company? Stripe published Increment for years, both online and in a very lovely print edition, and I wrote (for the same editor) for years for them until that no longer served Stripe's particular purpose for it. But it was all essentially independent editorial with nothing to do with Stripe's core mission. On the production side, I didn't see much of how it would look until it went live, and I think it tells an incredibly robust story—it's a great parallel to my reporting in a way that I've rarely seen in my whole career?!
  - emmanueloga_ 3y ago

majestic5762 3y ago

Yahoo Pipes was full of XSS vulns. I used to play with cookie grabbers

thedougd 3y ago

The best part of Pipes was that no one blocked it or it was difficult to block. I used it to scrape data from web pages that I served up via Android widget apps.

pythonbase 3y ago

I had my first taste of "automation" with Yahoo Pipes - scraping sites, generating alerts etc. Did a lot of workflows back in the day.

hermitcrab 3y ago

I never used Yahoo Pipes. Was it primarily for automating for manipulating stuff grabbed from the web. Or could you also usefully use it to wrangle/ETL local data files and databases?

Glench 3y ago
Mostly web stuff. See also this great piece about Yahoo Pipes called "My Heart Feeds a Series of Tubes": https://medium.com/message/my-heart-feeds-a-series-of-tubes-de78858ddfc8 https://medium.com/message/my-heart-feeds-a-series-of-tubes-...

newsclues 3y ago

I thought this was going to be about https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pipe_Mania https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pipe_Mania

Glench 3y ago

If you're more handy with code, I'd also recommend checking out https://val.town https://val.town which lets you quickly create automations and endpoints.

stevekrouse 3y ago
Thanks! Founder of Val Town here :) I actually was notified of this comment because I "follow" Glen on HN via this val: https://www.val.town/v/rodrigotello/hnFollow https://www.val.town/v/rodrigotello/hnFollow

g051051 3y ago

Congrats to the authors for taking a potentially great article and wrecking it with insane distractions and useless web BS. Pipes was an amazing piece of software and deserves better than that.

ksec 3y ago

Everytime I see Yahoo Pipes I remember the video [1] from Tom Scott about programming. ( The video title view count is updated in as close to real time as possible ) [1] This Video Has 69,187,812 Views https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BxV14h0kFs0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BxV14h0kFs0 A lot of what I thought were good, accessible, productive, entry to middle level technology ( HyperCards. Yahoo Pipes. Flash, Delphi etc ) never gained enough market. They were all the sort of middle ground good enough options. Instead technology is often filtered from the top end extreme. So everyone tries to use what Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft are using. Because those tools are deemed as what Professional should use. The only rare exception that is powering most of the word is Microsoft Excel.

zubairq 3y ago

Great article by Retool! Yep, Pipes was something different a the time!

danieldrehmer 3y ago

When people believed the internet was a series of tubes

nathanwallace 3y ago

Readers may enjoy Flowpipe [1], an open source cloud scripting engine we launched this week. It allows creation of pipelines in HCL to connect HTTP queries, run containers, execute lambda-compatible functions, query databases, etc all from your own machine / CLI. It can also be combined with Steampie[2], our open source project to query cloud resources (139+ plugins) with SQL. We're more DevOps focused, but Yahoo Pipes was part of the inspiration for our naming of these "pipes" :-) 1 - https://github.com/turbot/flowpipe https://github.com/turbot/flowpipe 2 - https://github.com/turbot/steampipe https://github.com/turbot/steampipe

john-tells-all 3y ago
I love Steampipe: it gives a simple and clear way to get feedback on many cloud resources. "select * from cloud" is a good synopsis. I'll check out Flowpipe!
- nathanwallace 3y ago
  Thanks for your kind words - so great to hear that :-). We're really excited about Flowpipe and think it makes "cloud scripting" really fun & easy through pipelines - please let us know how you go and what we can improve!

codepoet80 3y ago

[flagged]

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

donatj 3y ago

I loved Yahoo Pipes. I had so many pipes set up to filter RSS feeds and Podcasts down to just the types of content I cared about. Insanely useful, I miss it so much. A big example, I listen to a podcast where they have standard episodes and episodes where they play D&D and I just don’t care about the D&D ones so it was really nice to be able to filter them out.

charles_f 3y ago
Fun, that was also my primary use case for pipes. That and making title-only rss into full text rss
crtasm 3y ago
I use Handy Reading on f-droid/android and hide various things from feeds based on their title/category. Wonder if it could pass on a filtered feed to a podcast app somehow.

freediver 3y ago

Proud Pipes user. Does the web need something like this today and in what form? All the replacements that are offered pale in comparison to excitement it was to use Pipes 15 years ago. Are we simply past that point?

troyvit 3y ago
I skipped to chapter 9 in the article ("Clogged"), and it looked like Pipes failed because it didn't have a large enough team or a well-defined mission. As a result they couldn't offer a super robust product that would lure in enterprise users. "You could not purchase some number of guaranteed-to-work Pipes calls per month" is the quote from the article. The reason I think that interesting is because that's the model these days for everything from AI tokens to Monday.com seats. It makes me feel like Pipes was before its time. That said I've been collecting different "business glue" products that are similar to Pipes. To me, like you say, they aren't as interesting, exciting and intuitive as Pipes was, but maybe it just takes a little more digging. I tried to focus on open source tools but some aren't. - n8n io: https://n8n.io/integrations/mondaycom/ https://n8n.io/integrations/mondaycom/ - Node-RED: https://nodered.org/ https://nodered.org/ (just read about this one in this thread) - trigger dev: trigger.dev - automatisch.io: https://automatisch.io/docs/ https://automatisch.io/docs/ - Activepieces: https://www.activepieces.com/docs/getting-started/introduction https://www.activepieces.com/docs/getting-started/introducti... - Huginn: https://github.com/huginn/huginn https://github.com/huginn/huginn - budibase: https://budibase.com/ https://budibase.com/ - windmill: https://www.windmill.dev/ https://www.windmill.dev/ - tooljet: https://www.tooljet.com/workflows https://www.tooljet.com/workflows - Bracket: https://www.usebracket.com/pricing https://www.usebracket.com/pricing (just SalesForce <-> PostgreSQL) - Zapier: zapier.com/ Anyway I hope some of these are fun!
- Towaway69 3y ago
  Big Node-RED fan here. For me it has the perfect combination between visual flow based programming[0] and textual coding. It makes a great effort in making visual programming incredible efficient. Node-RED does great job in implementing the ideas of FBP in visual manner. [0] = https://jpaulm.github.io/fbp/ https://jpaulm.github.io/fbp/

kossTKR 3y ago

I feel like theres a potential for B2B solutions in this space. Especially for workers who want to bootstrap something quick, avoid something like Teams or other behemoths, create something for a one time survey, campaign, shorter process etc. So much was lost transitioning from web 2.0 to whatever walled dystopian garbage we have now. The concept of pipes are way back from the Unix days, and the idea of this modularity and later building stuff from a flow based interface like this somehow never translated into anything on the frontend side. I've been met with simple specs that had to be built with custom web solutions a few times now where i've almost started building a generalised model like this that could scale because most apps could be defined like this, as entities related with filters between them in sequences related to each other and web views where people could interact. The closest i found back then was something like Airtable/Zapier combinations that was extremely limited.

RyLuke 3y ago

(Hi, Retool employee here who worked on this piece.) This is the second installment[1] in what we hope will be a regular series telling the stories of novel programming environments that had a lot of influence on developers. Creating these is a labor of love—we get to talk to the original teams who built products that were formational for us. We have an incredible in-house creative team that finds a way to sneak these fun mini-sites in amongst their other work. For me, the most exciting part of working on a product like Retool is that it's an evolution of lot of ideas from the past. We're always looking at prior art to spark ideas and challenge our assumptions as we're building. There are many great ideas in old computing papers and products that were either before their time, or lost when there were major shifts in the industry. Pipes was a touchpoint for us as we built out one of our newer products[2]. We have lots of ideas for future installments in this series, but if you have any programming environments that were near and dear to you heart, let me know! [1] Our first deep-dive was on Visual Basic. I'm very biased (I wrote it!), but if you like Glenn's Pipes piece, you'll probably enjoy this one too. :) https://retool.com/visual-basic https://retool.com/visual-basic [2] Retool Workflows: https://retool.com/workflows https://retool.com/workflows

apitman 3y ago
Hi Ryan, I appreciate the artistic approach taken, but thought you might want to know the page barely works for me in Firefox 120 on Linux 6.6. Everything is very laggy and the scrolljacking is terrible. Chromium is much smoother but the scrolljacking is still bad. Generally speaking I don't think Linux is a target platform worth worrying too much about, but when it comes to programming-related content that might not be the case.
- Lammy 3y ago
  Same here on Firefox 120 Win10, but I don't mind it on the rare occasion such as this where it's half art project half write-up. If it were every article it would get tiresome.
- mikestew 3y ago
  Generally speaking I don't think Linux is a target platform Maybe, but you’d think an iOS iPad might be a target. I just closed the tab, as there’s no reader view, and the janky scrolling and waiting for text to load (text!) wasn’t worth the effort.

julianeon 3y ago

I think you could make the case that Zapier is the monetized version of Pipes. It's a 5 billion dollar company now.

donnellyp 3y ago

i have a few (new, unworn) pipes tshirts left. mostly XL thou. and a ton of pipes stickers.

apitman 3y ago
Are you selling them?
kentbrew 3y ago
Um, yes please! @xoxo.zone@kentbrew

Towaway69 3y ago

For anyone interested in visual programming, I would recommend having a look at Flow Based Programming[0] better known for being the inspiration for Unix pipes, which in turn were name giver for pipes in yahoo pipes. [0]=https://jpaulm.github.io/fbp/ https://jpaulm.github.io/fbp/

pazimzadeh 3y ago

Another amazing node-based app that was deprecated is Quartz Composer on Mac. It was extended by Mike Matas' team when he was at Facebook: https://medium.com/the-year-of-the-looking-glass/introducing-origami-for-quartz-composer-f1173d0bd181 https://medium.com/the-year-of-the-looking-glass/introducing... although this was also later deprecated in favor of Origami Studio, which retains the node-based UI: https://origami.design/ https://origami.design/

Lammy 3y ago

I 'member it used to be a thing to blogspam AdSense with Y! Pipes via RSS subscriptions to source sites → translate to non-English language → translate back to English → auto-post to AdSense-encumbered Wordpress blog.

brundolf 3y ago

Hmm this has my gears turning These days there's an abundance of public APIs that serve up various public information. What if you took a bunch of those, wrapped them up in a single typed SDK in TS or Python (using their existing SDKs if they exist), under a consistent devex, and just made it really easy to playfully string together different datasets

didip 3y ago
Zapier already took the Pipes idea into a startup.

bosky101 3y ago

I was the organizer of the first pipesCamp[1], in a sleepy town in india. What were we thinking! Ha. Fun times. We did get coverage. It truly was a powerful product, and I hat-tip all the wonderful folks at Yahoo involved. https://web.archive.org/web/20080312062739/http://developer.yahoo.net/blog/archives/2008/01/first-ever_pipescamp_unconference.html#comments https://web.archive.org/web/20080312062739/http://developer....