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Yahoo Pipes End-Of-life Announcement
- michaelhoffman 11y agoI figured this was going to happen years ago. Any suggestions for a replacement?
- atourgates 11y agoPlatforms like IFTTT Zapier have worked well for me, though they're certainly not direct 1:1 replacements.
- Concours 11y agoSure, check out http://www.feedsapi.com http://www.feedsapi.com , it's probably the best replacement at this point, iit's however not a 1 to 1 replacement.
- cloud36 11y agoI wonder how many people still use pipes?
- WalterGR 11y agoOne data point: I used it for the first time 2 weeks ago. Meetup.com has calendar feeds. You can get a calendar feed for all the events you've RSVPed "yes" to. You can get individual calendar feeds for each group's events. But there's no way to get a calendar feed of all the events happening in all of your groups. I'm a member of something like 40 groups. The thought of manually adding each feed as a separate calendar in Thunderbird - and the thought of Thunderbird then trying to cope with the result - was... unpleasant. So I set up a pipe to combine all the feeds into one. Very cursory googling suggested that Yahoo Pipes was the easiest way to accomplish this. Fairly slick UI. Unfortunately it turns out that meetup.com apparently serves 503s to requests coming from Pipes.
- anigbrowl 11y agoUnfortunately it turns out that meetup.com apparently serves 503s to requests coming from Pipes. That's really interesting. I think it exemplifies a problem that has been bothering me for a while: for many sites, scripting and design are antipatterns designed to corral rather than enable the user and leverage branding.
- deskglass 11y agoI used a pipe that created RSS feeds from Google+ pages in conjunction with some other stuff to get all the articles I'd want to read in one document (with a table of contents) delivered to my kindle. I'm now working on something that doesn't use Y! Pipes and simplifies the process. We all knew it was coming, but the end of Pipes still sucks.
- chrisamiller 11y agoOh man, I use 3 or 4 pipes to filter various RSS feeds. Ugh. Good suggestions for replacements (especially those that don't require my own server) would be much appreciated.
- maxerickson 11y agoAre they also shutting down YQL? I think YQL queries can do everything pipes can, you just have to write little scripts to do it instead of the UI. Still has the Yahoo problem, but it might be the easiest short term.
- wsc981 11y agoStill has the Yahoo problem, but it might be the easiest short term. The Yahoo problem being that it might be shutdown in the near future?
- giancarlostoro 11y agoMaybe they're focusing on YQL instead, if it does offer similar functionality.
- spullara 11y agoMy understanding is that YQL is being used as the middleware between services internally. Will probably not be shut down, but they could shut off the publicly accessible one. One thing not mentioned in this thread is that Pipes 2.0 was a rewrite from the original Pipes which was written in Perl. We ported it to the same engine that powers YQL. As for why shut down Pipes if it shares infrastructure with YQL? Probably because usage is mostly RSS crawlers that no one looks at anymore.
- anigbrowl 11y agoYQL queries can do everything pipes can, you just have to write little scripts to do it instead of the UI Argh! The UI was the innovative part. The whole point of something like this is that you don't have to learn a bunch of syntax - when you add a module, it tells you what sort of data it needs to know (such as a URL or...) and when you connect modules together it tells you what sort of inputs and outputs are available. This allows you to focus on the actual problem domain instead of the morphology of the query language, which is not important to the user. I keep encountering this attitude among programmers - 'I type code all day, so why don't you want to do the same thing?' If people wanted to type stuff all the time the command line would still rule, but the majority of people prefer graphic user interfaces because they don't want to write code, they want to make selections from available options and use the computer to take care of the plumbing. This is a Good Thing. It's easier, more fun, and yields greater productivity, for the same reason that handing someone a box of Lego is better than handing them a few blocks of wood and a set of carving tools. The existence of Lego hasn't led to a collapse of sculpture or mechanical engineering. On the contrary, the simplicity, consistency, and interoperability of the different components has made a massive creative, educational, and commercial success. I don't mean this as a hit on you personally, but I find comments like the above frustrating. Imagine you went into a police station to report the disappearance of your bicycle and the person behind the desk shrugged and said 'you're still able to run around on your legs, what's the problem? Your bicycle may have allowed you to go faster down the street but it's not like you could ride it up and down stairs so you should be happy with walking on your feet.' The problem is the loss of a tool that offered substantial efficiencies on some common tasks even though it wasn't ideal for every situation. You'd probably be equally pissed off if your favorite high level language went away and you were told you could just go back to writing assembler. I personally love doing things in assembler because it makes me feel smart but that doesn't mean it's better than high level languages.
- psadri 11y agopipes creator here: sad to see pipes shutdown. i am surprised it lasted this long -- it was abandoned years ago. on the positive side, it is nice to see it mentioned in the same sentence as y! maps which used to be a big deal back in the day.
- ceejayoz 11y agoIt was really freaking awesome. Thank you!
- webwanderings 11y agoPlease suggest alternate. You built a good thing. RSS overall is becoming history.
- psadri 11y agoIFTTT and Zapier are spiritual successors to Pipes, although their focus is on APIs vs feeds. Maybe start a new, open source version of Pipes?
- basch 11y agoIt really would be oh so nice to have something that can ingest RSS and Tweets and then apply filters to them while visualizing the logic through a graphical interface. Maybe even some fuzzy machine learning to use in building filters. Some more advanced dupe technology would go a long way. People would be building their own techmemes in no time. You could build ranking systems that award bonus points if something like longform or techmeme mention something. Maybe im dreaming about a free version of Percolate, which I have heard is really cool.
- arepb 11y agoIn an alternate universe not too dissimilar from our own, Pipes is an independent startup and this announcement is Yahoo buying it for 8-9 figures
- Touche 11y agoThere was IFTTT but looking at their page now it seems like maybe they have pivoted, at least I can't tell that it works like it used to: https://ifttt.com/ https://ifttt.com/
- enobrev 11y agoIf you sign in all the previous functionality is still there. Seems their landing page is only advertising their new "Do" apps (which are a one-button extension of the old IFTTT recipes). Installed it, but never used them much.
- zubairov 11y agoMany see tools like http://Zapier.com http://Zapier.com or http://elastic.io http://elastic.io (disclaimer - I'm a founder) as alternative to Pipes and IFFT.
- onli 11y agoBut all of them seem to miss the focus on RSS, or even just the ability to manipulate feeds.
- mxfh 11y agoZapier is the only reliable tool I found so far that can still import RSS to facebook pages, it tried it with pipes and it had issues with non-standard fields.
- justincormack 11y agoThe whole internet misses the previous focus on RSS...
- danso 11y agoYahoo Pipes was the backbone for ProPublica's first news web application in 2009: http://www.propublica.org/article/changetracker-howto http://www.propublica.org/article/changetracker-howto > ChangeTracker watches the White House’s web site so you don’t have to. Whenever a page on whitehouse.gov changes, we’ll let you know — via e-mail, Twitter, or RSS. But ChangeTracker is not a piece of software. It’s the output of a series of powerful and mostly free Web-based tools, lovingly connected over the Internet. Here’s how to do it yourself so you can track changes on any Web site on the Internets.
- matznerd 11y agoWho is working on a pipes replacement and where can I sign-up? Maybe this will be like when google killed Reader and RSS replacements became a hot area...
- jdavid 11y agoI was looking into doing a Pipes 2.0 sort of project. If you live in the bay area i'd love to get coffee and chat about it. There are a number of the pieces to pipes that are opensource, but none of them are strung together. I also thought that pipes queries were amazing, but slow, so it was hard to use them as part of an application.
- voltagex_ 11y agoI'm too far away for coffee, but my email address is in my profile.
- darkstar999 11y agoHave you tried IFTTT? Not sure what your usecase is, but that might do the job.
- durin42 11y agoIFTTT doesn't let me basically reformat an RSS feed and then see it in my RSS reader. Most/all of my use of pipes was "go scrape this thing and turn it into RSS, filtering out stuff I don't want to see." It was great for that - I'm unaware of anything that is even trying to replace it.
- joshstrange 11y agoThis a disappointment if not an unexpected one. I used pipes again just a few weeks ago to do some simple modification of feed but thankfully ended up taking another approach (not a pipes replacement I just wrote some code for it). Pipes was a really cool tool and it will be missed. Does anyone know of/use any alternatives?
- idlewords 11y agoI worked on Pipes briefly, shortly after it launched. It was really two distinct products rolled into one. The visual interface was groundbreaking and stunning-I think half my team was hired on the strength of that demo. No one could believe Javascript could do that. The backend was an extremely useful tool for munging RSS feeds. With any kind of support, or even benign neglect, the product would have been successful. It took a lot of active mismanagement and folly to keep Pipes from living up to its promise. Hats off to psadri and the other Pipes creators for a really stellar piece of work.
- psadri 11y agoThanks :) Pipes's interface is primary the work of Jonathan Trevor, with lots of help from Daniel Raffel, Ed Ho and others.
- smacktoward 11y ago> It took a lot of active mismanagement and folly to keep Pipes from living up to its promise. I feel like this unique blend will be Yahoo's lasting contribution to the field of management theory.
- bsder 11y agoDEC/Compaq/HP is really hard to top in the area of mismanagement.
- sirkneeland 11y agoDon't forget Nokia. Going from #1 in a market to doing so badly that you exit the market--and all in the span of 3 years--is something to behold.
- hippiefahrzeug 11y agogood one. it's what one famous blogger calls the 'elop effect': http://communities-dominate.blogs.com/brands/2011/08/coining-term-elop-effect-when-you-combine-osborne-effect-and-ratner-effect.html http://communities-dominate.blogs.com/brands/2011/08/coining...
- Volt 11y agoI've used this pipe as my Hacker News RSS feed for the last 5 years, which flips the link structure so the main link for each entry is to the comments. http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.info?_id=0e19519adf051525192d459e8249e833 http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.info?_id=0e19519adf0515251... Thanks to whoever made it. I guess I'll have to find a way to do it myself now.
- bbrian 11y agoThe main one I made was to switch the actual link for the Reddit RSS feed to be the main link, set the true article title as the item title, use the submitted title as the item body and add a link to the link's domain in the bottom. http://feeds.feedburner.com/RedditArticles http://feeds.feedburner.com/RedditArticles And another where I put the pictures inline (though the 3rd party API I was using isn't handling things too well anymore) http://feeds.feedburner.com/RedditPicturesWithPictures http://feeds.feedburner.com/RedditPicturesWithPictures I still have 146 subscribers to keep happy, though Feedburner should make any transition transparent. I'm disappointed it's going. Thank you to those who made it!
- callumjones 11y agoI can understand why Pipes would be shut down by Yahoo, it was a impressive technical feat but it definitely appealed to very small developer focused crowd. I feel like IFTTT is our best bet, while it doesn't do the "Unix pipe" that pipes offered it at least provides some usability to the process.
- jccalhoun 11y agoSad but not expected. It was really powerful but, like most people, I stopped using it years ago. It kept breaking either due to the sites I was using it with changing things or the service being neglected (and my limited ability to understand how it worked!)
- pjbrunet 11y agoIf I was looking for a replacement, maybe I'd look for an RSS aggregation plugin for WordPress? Personally, I have my own PHP code that will slice and dice feeds however I want. I got about halfway through building a "news blend" app where you tap just the categories you want and it would blend all the latest articles from just your categories into one news feed and email that to you daily. But we never finished it.
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- brettproctor 11y agoPipes was the first service I ever owned from an ops perspective (circa 2008). We had two clusters, one on each coast. I thought we had capacity to take one offline to do a full upgrade, turns out we didn't. By the time I turned the west coast back online, the east coast was failing health checks, and the LB failed everything over to the west coast, which then proceeded to be overloaded, and everything flipped back to the east coast... Ping ponged for about 2 hours until they finally settled. Fun times. Another fun story: For the longest time the front page had an example pipe that merged search results from various online sites (amazon/ebay/cl). It was made by a former employee and was easily one of the most popular pipes. One day we found out he had his affiliate id in all of those links. We chuckled and moved on.
- psadri 11y agoBusiness model :) Just to be clear, I had not idea about that until now.
- product50 11y agoDid your remove the affiliate ID?
- scoot 11y agoWe chuckled and moved on.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- fletchowns 11y ago> had his affiliate id in all of those links Wow that must have added up to quite the haul
- Someone1234 11y agoI wonder if they had put in a Yahoo! owned affiliate link, if the site would not still be operating (and self-funding) today...
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- paulhauggis 11y agoThis is why I just roll my own data mining tools.
- tomcam 11y agoPipes was awesome. But was there ever a credible strategy to monetize it? Does anyone on HN have any ideas?
- bryanh 11y agoAw man - that is sad. We at Zapier took great inspiration from Pipes, it was such a cool and powerful product! It was a shame to see it languish. I'd sure love to pick the brain of anyone formerly involved in the project - it seems like there is a lot we could learn from the trail it blazed. My email in profile, obligatory beers/coffee/etc. offer.
- zacharycohn 11y agoYou guys are fantastic. I use Zapier for several of my organizations and companies, and I cannot understate how incredible of a service you guys have created. <3 for days. My only wish would be for a paid tier between 100 and 3000. If I went hog-wild and did everything I want to do, I'd probably use 200-300 a month. I would love to pay for that. But there's some loss-aversion psychology happening that makes me not want to pay for 3000 if I know I'll only use 300. I'd give you my cc number right now if you did a 1000 zaps at $10/m. That being said - you know your business better than I do. If it would hurt conversions of $20/m more than it would help, I get that. :) <3 you guys though.
- mikeknoop 11y agoThanks for this Zach, we keep re-evaluating and running pricing tests, and this plays into that a bit. Reach out anytime if you need help!
- stevenjohns 11y agoI actually had the same query last year when I pushed a place I work at to use a combination of Yahoo! Pipes and Zapier for our Facebook postings. I asked for a smaller plan (we only need about 600-700 zaps/month at the most) and was just instructed by their support to utilize their reward program[0] which offered an extra 50-100 zaps/month based on what you 'complete,' and it included things like (IIRC) liking them on Facebook or following them on Twitter. It seems like that program has since been limited, however, as it now redirects to a referral page[1] only. A combination of a couple referrals around the office and performing the required tasks gave us about ~650 monthly "zaps" at the time and we haven't needed more than that so far. Still, I would have happily paid $5/month or something to avoid the hassle (and be able to pay them for their wonderful product). [0] https://zapier.com/rewards/ https://zapier.com/rewards/ [1] https://zapier.com/referral/ https://zapier.com/referral/
- jotm 11y agoAw damn, that kinda sucks, but the project has been dead for a while now. I used it for content aggregation, but moved on to custom scripts, which were way more powerful...
- Animats 11y agoMost of what Pipes did can be done locally, in a library. FeedReader for Windows did this.[1] Unfortunately, they recently announced "Get ready for the brand new FeedReader! ... Check our site later this March for a new amazing web service, featuring industry-best RSS search and analysis.", which means it's becoming "cloud based" and probably has ads or worse. "rss.com" already went that way; they charge $6/month to read RSS feeds.[2] Following RSS feeds on a continuing basis takes a lot of RSS polls. Most RSS feeds do not implement RSS in a way that allows getting only new items reliably.[3] The RSS "etag" mechanism is not reliable. Some sites with multiple servers and a load balancer have different etag values on each server. The "guid" field sometimes changes when the content hasn't changed. My experience is that nothing short of full text comparison eliminates duplicates properly. I wrote an RSS reader which does a MD5 of the text of each incoming message to throw out duplicates. Presumably the "pipes" system did something similar. If RSS feed servers complied with the standard, there'd be less need for feed aggregation services. [1] http://feedreader.com/ http://feedreader.com/ [2] https://www.rss.com/ https://www.rss.com/ [3] http://www.詹姆斯.com/blog/2006/08/rss-dup-detection http://www.詹姆斯.com/blog/2006/08/rss-dup-detection
- sanderjd 11y agoI think your first paragraph speaks to a real tension in the world of software: web applications have enormous discoverability, immediacy, upgradeability, and (often) social collaboration advantages over native applications, but they have ongoing costs proportional to their popularity, so it's harder to run them without ulterior financial motives.
- ing33k 11y agoin 2010 I attended Yahoo Hack Day in Bangalore/ India. Thats where I learned about Pipes. This was the only tool needed to create a tech mashup.
- bitwize 11y agoWeb mashup! Hey, remember the late 2000s?
- donnellyp 11y agoJust a shout out to the awesome Pipes community and some people that really helped it along the way. All the original creators (pasha, JT, ed, daniel), community members and team: hapdaniel, dawnfoster, kentbrewster, mirek, spullara, janluehe, dspark, kevink, brettp, lolo, laurencecoates, earth2marsh, psychemedia, davglass, ssaine, sadaf, ido, nagesh, ameya. I know i'm missing tons more, but just top of my head. You are all awesome.
- kentbrew 11y agoPaul, thanks for keeping it running for so long. Pipes was the prime mover behind "suddenly, everything is mashable."
- edho 11y agoThanks for all of your work. Wouldn't have been the same without you.
- donnellyp 11y agoThanks guys, it was such an exciting product to work with, create with and help all the community members. I learned the most from this product.
- shavenwarthog2 11y agoI used Yahoo Pipes to find my apartment. One pipe would grab data from Craigslist, strip out irrelevant items, and send me a text if anything new and interesting appeared. Ditto for Westside Rentals. This combination worked great. If a lame apartment appeared in CL, I'd edit my Pipes regex to strip the same thing out of WR. In this way I'd get only texts for awesome places. Vaya con dios, Yahoo Pipes!
- bbrian 11y agoAh, I did this too! I'd forgotten about it. As I was looking, I'd continually update it to block out streets I wasn't interested in, then eventually I was only getting notifications for exactly where I wanted for exactly how much. I also used it with Freecycle and got a fridge-freezer! (you had to be quick to get them)
- atomicfiredoll 11y agoI was also using it exactly like this until recently! I sent my roommate the pipe and we'd each watch/browse it for new places. It saved us a ton of effort.
- bluesmoon 11y agoMy website is partially powered by pipes. Looks like I'll have to rewrite.
- tomsoderlund 11y agoI'm a big fan of Yahoo Pipes, and sad to hear it's being shut down. Pipes and Visual Basic shaped my view of how fun and easy programming can be. We're trying to build on this legacy with Weld(.io). See a sneak peek of our programming UI at 0:40 here: http://youtu.be/faG3uuOnqxY http://youtu.be/faG3uuOnqxY If anyone in the Pipes team would like to be involved somehow, ping me on tom@weld.io
- ChrisArchitect 11y agoback when pipes came on the scene it was so out there but it was amazing. We couldn't fathom what kind of magic was making it all work and there seemed to be so many possiblities. Future bright etc. Of course, landscape changed etc...but it was / remains a display of what is possible with the web and kind of the 'idea' of an open web/apis/all that jazz. I am still using it to repurpose an XKCD feed into a fully formatted feed with images that then is picked up by IFTTT and tweeted out as a tweet with images when new comics go up. I used Pipes just because it was point'n'click and seemed to have all the key components I needed to do the task without worrying about the code-route.
- orliesaurus 11y agoThanks for your service! You've done great!
- UserRights 11y agoplease open source it, thank you!
- kentbrew 11y agoWhile working for YDN I was the one who spilled the beans about the top-secret Pipes _callback parameter, which turned your JSON reply into JavaScript. The service fell over instantly, of course, but far from being upset with me, the team was thrilled with the exposure. Viva Pipes! Any word on whether YQL will live or die?
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- donatj 11y agoAs the one person still using Yahoo Pipes, I'm rather saddened by this. Does this also imply an eventual end to YQL I wonder?
- pknerd 11y agoSad to hear that. I guess Pipes was the first and probably the last innovative product ever shipped by Yahoo!
- denimboy 11y agoYahoo pipes was obviously influenced by UNIX pipes and as such is one of the best demonstrations of flow based programming to date. I really loved Yahoo pipes and it influenced the way I think. Pipes was a basic web "agent". It made basic programming available to the everyman much like HyperCard. Perhaps is just needed a runtime UI that matched the excellence of its design time interface. Yahoo is focussing on mobile yet here they had this custom agent building tool that could easily be re-purposed to mobile to make a killer platform for Yahoo users. Hopefully they will opensource the first generation perl version. Some of my favourite flow based programming links follow. Surprised nobody has mentioned noflow node.js workflows: https://github.com/noflo/noflo Also this (untested) will convert your yahoo pipes into Node.js https://github.com/neyric/pipes2js and this one (also untested) will do the same in python: https://github.com/ggaughan/pipe2py There is also python pypes which has a yahoo pipes like frontend with a stackless based backend. http://pyvideo.org/video/400/pycon-2011--large-scale-data-conditioning--amp--p https://github.com/fullscale/pypes Other python flow based programming tools https://wiki.python.org/moin/FlowBasedProgramming http://www.kamaelia.org/Home.html (BBC research) http://www.ruffus.org.uk/index.html Wireit is a javascript pipes like frontend http://neyric.github.io/wireit/docs/ As you can see I loved pipes and I can
- psadri 11y agoCorrect and thanks for those links. Pipes was influenced by unix pipes (hence the name). The UI was influenced by National Instrument's LabView and Apple's Automator. I wish Pipes was launched in the age of containers (e.g. Docker). We had the idea of one click deployment to what we today call a container.
- empyrical 11y agoI really hope there's a new service that can pick up where Pipes left off, it was a huge shame how it fizzled out at yahoo.
- DonHopkins 11y agoPaul Haberli made ConMan on SGI workstations: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.78.5331 http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.78.5... http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.78.5331&rep=rep1&type=pdf http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.78.... ConMan: A Visual Programming Language for Interactive Graphics (1988) Abstract Traditionally, interactive applications have been difficult to build, modify and extend. These integrated applications provide bounded functionality, have a single thread of control and a fixed user interface that must anticipate every-thing the user will need. Current workstations allow several processes to share the screen. With proper communication between processes, it is possible to escape previous models for application development and evolution. ConMan is a high-level visual language we use on an IRIS workstation that lets users dynamically build and modify graphics applications. To do this, a system designer disintegrates complex applications into modular components. By interactively connecting simple components, the user constructs a complete graphics application that matches the needs of a task. A connection manager controls the flow of data between individual components. As a result, we replace the usual user-machine dialog with a dynamic live performance that is orchestrated by the user.
- interactiv 11y agoI'm really motived to create an opensource alternative as I was a big pipes user. I set up a repo (obviously empty for now) ,I'll try to come up with a minimal working app before yahoo pipes gets frozen: github.com/interactiv/pipes didn't decide yet what serverside tech i'll be using but quick deployement is a priority for me. If anyone's interested. EDIT: a lot of useful information here about existing projects, thanks.
- juliendorra 11y agoI used Pipes as the basis of data mashup classes, with non-developers students that were mostly afraid/bored of anything related to programming. Using Pipes, in just a few hours they would make small, custom data apps. A typical example would be a student building a pipe gathering the weather from one source and trying to fetch the relevant clothes from a retailer with pictures and links. I had a student using the location entity extraction to geocode his favorite street art blog that cited cities in the text but didn't use rssgeo, and then output the augmented feed to a map view. It was an eye opener for some: they could get, transform and repurpose data, and it could be fun. Pipes wasn't without its flaws: V1 was buggy and gave us a lot of trouble when 30 students were trying to use it from the same IP, the interface was plagued by the usual issues of visual interfaces (clutter…). Some things were odd, some a little too hard for what they achieved and other were magically easy! But at a moment when every tech company is saying that "learning to code" is important, it's sad to see a tool that had real educational value disappear. It was a really effective tool for non-developers to learn about data markup standards, to think in term of data flows, to get introduced to the idea of a data or web API. For this particular use in education I'm not sure there is a replacement.
- spdustin 11y agoAs some deeper comment posted, Huginn [0] is awesome, an open-source connector-of-things like Zapier or IFTTT, but on your own server. [0] https://github.com/cantino/huginn https://github.com/cantino/huginn
- narrator 11y agoIn the enterprise space this concept is thriving and doing well. For example, SnapLogic has been building enterprise integration technology that can easily tie hundreds of different data sources together using pre-built or custom components using a GUI or programmatically. In order to become a critical part of business infrastructure it needs to be a professionally supported and maintained product. Yahoo Pipes was just an experiment and not a serious business so people never built anything serious on top of it that would pay for the underlying maintenance and infrastructure.
- nreece 11y agoDisappointing news. But, if you're just looking at creating custom feeds for webpages, then try out Feedity - https://feedity.com https://feedity.com
- wiresurfer 11y agoI have been a fan of Pipes for a while. Kudos to @psadri and others who made it possible with the state of web tech back in the days. It was a very well made tool both frontend and backend wise! I have a emotional connect with Pipes as a tool. Right out of college, and before the whole API thing was pervasive, I had leveraged pipes for so many small projects and hacks. Infact I used it in a Yahoo Hackday hack and it landed me a gig at Y! More relevant to the present, It has been something I have mentioned to so many people who have come to me discussing UIs for automation/control systems/or to manage workflows, processes. In a way it was what noflow's UI looks like, but years in advance. In a different parallel universe, it may be the way people use APIs, or right big Haddop/Spark/Storm jobs/topologies, and the front end was open-sourced back in the day, with full integration with hadoop for job management.
- juxtio 11y agoSorry to see Pipes being sunset. It had a major design and UX influence on a number of us during the early Web 2.0 days. Kudos to the Pipes folks for a seminal creation. On a related note, a couple of us have been hacking on a Pipes like user experience around Data Integration and Analytics with Web feeds and APIs -- we had been planning a separate announcement but thought this might be a useful place to post if there are others who are looking for alternatives. Please message me directly - my contact info is in my profile.
- llamataboot 11y agoYahoo Pipes was probably one of the best examples of letting non-programmers be developers. I created a lot of useful pipes back in the day for friends and family. Used a particular craigslist one for years.
- xefer 11y agoI always knew this day would eventually come. It's kind of sad. I had created this years ago to display Twitter data using Pipes, YQL and Google Charts. I haven't had to touch it in years but it's always just quietly worked, and some people seem to like it: http://xefer.com/twitter http://xefer.com/twitter ; e.g.; http://xefer.com/twitter/xefer http://xefer.com/twitter/xefer I liked that Pipes allowed services to be chained together driven from the browser.
- flinty 11y agoThere was an awesome pipe which allowed you to get a rss feed of commentators you want to subscribe to. Sadly no more
- donretag 11y agoI use Yahoo Pipes to get around Netflix's walled garden. Netflix does not believe in RSS, even though their Influencer content is not behind a subwall. I use Pipes to parse Netflix's json content and then turn it into a feed. I even created a Pipe that took any influencer ID and automatically created an RSS feed. The idea was started because Daniel Tunkelang of Netflix was very anti RSS. I showed him, but alas, no more. I never figured out how to use IFTTT. How can you grab any content from the web, like Netflix's json content? There is no HTTP input as far as I can tell.
- stevenjohns 11y agoI used a combination of Yahoo! Pipes and IFTTT personally. I'm not sure how people are using IFTTT on its own. For me, I would do the data parsing on Yahoo! Pipes and prepare everything to be triggered, and then the actions would be performed on a service like IFTTT (where the instruction was to just post whatever new item came in the feed).
- dtunkelang 11y ago> "The idea was started because Daniel Tunkelang of Netflix was very anti RSS." Um, what? I've never worked at Netflix, and I've never been anti-RSS. And I'm pretty sure there isn't another Daniel Tunkelang. :-)
- waldr 11y agoPipes was certainly an inspiration behind what we've been working on at tray.io - sad to see this come to a close. Hats off to all those that worked on the product - great to see it remembered so fondly.
- bootload 11y agoUsing pipes was interesting and certainly did what it reported. I always capture what Showing operators: https://www.flickr.com/photos/bootload/385194782/ https://www.flickr.com/photos/bootload/385194782/
- bootload 11y agoUsing pipes was interesting and certainly did what it reported. I always capture what Showing operators: https://www.flickr.com/photos/bootload/385194782/ https://www.flickr.com/photos/bootload/385194782/
- bootload 11y agoI remember well using and playing with Pipes when it came out early 2007. The service worked. I mostly played around with my twitter and flicker feeds. Here's some screenshots of what it looked like. cloning twit user: https://www.flickr.com/photos/bootload/385441178/ https://www.flickr.com/photos/bootload/385441178/ multiple feeds into one: https://www.flickr.com/photos/bootload/385433038/ https://www.flickr.com/photos/bootload/385433038/ extracting flickr data: https://www.flickr.com/photos/bootload/385101700/ https://www.flickr.com/photos/bootload/385101700/ and flickr backend https://www.flickr.com/photos/bootload/2789198106/ https://www.flickr.com/photos/bootload/2789198106/ extracting twitter data: https://www.flickr.com/photos/bootload/385194782/ https://www.flickr.com/photos/bootload/385194782/ clogged pipes: https://www.flickr.com/photos/bootload/384133421/ https://www.flickr.com/photos/bootload/384133421/ and https://www.flickr.com/photos/bootload/384128224/ https://www.flickr.com/photos/bootload/384128224/ Read the comments on this link to get an idea of how I used Pipes and the logic behind it: https://www.flickr.com/photos/bootload/385101700 https://www.flickr.com/photos/bootload/385101700
- gsam 11y agoFirst Google Reader and now Pipes? What's the problem with RSS and please tell me what's better?
- Aissen 11y agoI loved yahoo pipes. I used it to filter high-traffic RSS to do a trivial word-match on content. I am now in the process of moving this to Newsblur, which allows filtering RSS content on tags, authors, or any word in the title. It's actually quite good, although we can't use the same filters for multiple feeds; at least it does the job.
- chinpokomon 11y agoSo sad to see Pipes go! I absolutely love Pipes and was just raving about it to a coworker this week. Terrific UI and a fantastic idea. When development fizzled out, I tried to find another service as a replacement, but everything I've tried has fallen short. I'm really disappointed as Pipes is definitely one of the best ideas that never caught on line it should. Popfly, while short lived, had the advantage of being able to modify the code behind, but it didn't come close to the fantastic ease of use and tremendous potential for reuse.
- FractalNerve 11y agoOne of the truly powerful services, I will really miss. Mrs. Meyer squeezes out things at Y! like a lemon. EDIT: added OSS & Commercial alternatives free or commercial: [1] http://createfeed.fivefilters.org/ [2] http://www.feedsapi.com/ [3] https://theenginuity.com/search/ [4] https://zapier.com/ [5] http://www.elastic.io/ [6] https://ifttt.com/ open source: [1] https://github.com/olviko/RssPercolator [2] https://github.com/fogbeam/Neddick/ [3] https://github.com/cantino/huginn [4] https://github.com/fullscale/pypes [5] https://github.com/jparkrr/ISyTT [6] https://github.com/atask/shifttt [7] https://github.com/KLVN/F7_T7_RSSFeed
- s0me0ne 11y agoPipes gui was revolutionary when it came out and to me is invaluable. Shame to see it and rss die out from mass appeal :(