Yahoo Pipes
23 points by hunter-2 3 years ago | 16 comments- 2bitencryption 3 years agoI miss when Yahoo was really cool. Even long after it was made irrelevant, it had some of the best freely available public data APIs on the web.
I remember in college, one of our first programming projects was to create a "weather website" (this was before everything was an "app"). The project instructions suggested we use the Yahoo weather API, and it blew my mind that anyone could just make a http GET request and instantly get back some human-and-machine readable data, no scraping required.
- tectonic 3 years agoYahoo! Pipes inspired me to make Huginn. https://GitHub.com/huginn/huginn
- Jermaine_Jabi 3 years agoThanks for making it! Huginn is my go to for buying used stuff on kijiji. I've saved so much effort and $ thanks to this project
- dwrodri 3 years agoHa! Just mentioned this project to someone else in the thread. Just wanted to say thanks for making such a cool project that puts the power of controlled automation back in the hands of the individual.
- Jermaine_Jabi 3 years ago
- lordofmoria 3 years agoIt’s interesting how much this foreshadowed what’s happening with BI dashboard aggregators that Get built into Snowflake and Power BI. Sometimes I wonder why the RSS feed didn’t become more foundational internet tech
- todsacerdoti 3 years agoIf you loved Yahoo! Pipes, you should try https://pipedream.com
- meenan 3 years agoI use Azure Logic Apps to replace a simple API mashup I would have previously used Pipes for. No complaints
- ahmedfromtunis 3 years agoI'm sad I wasn't aware of this "app" when it was around. But everytime I hear about it, it is from people who "miss" it. If this is the case, then why nobody came up with a clone to it?
- dwrodri 3 years agoCheck out IFTTT (https://ifttt.com) or Huginn (https://github.com/huginn/huginn). They're similar but not quite.
An underlying assumption with Yahoo Pipes was that interesting places on the Internet would offer APIs which have a developer UX that matches or exceeds the quality of their official UI. A mixture of unprofitability and abuse lead to this no longer being the case. Tom Scott's essay here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BxV14h0kFs0
- easrng 3 years agoSee also https://nodered.org/
- easrng 3 years ago
- Glench 3 years ago> If this is the case, then why nobody came up with a clone to it?
It was back in the Web 2.0 days when there were more open data sources and interchangeable data was a priority — RSS/Atom feeds and JSON APIs.
I think that a lot of the "no code" tools we're seeing today are direct descendants of Yahoo Pipes. In addition to the tools others have mentioned that are more directly inspired by Yahoo Pipes, there's also Zapier and other automation services that connect data from different sources.
- weare138 3 years agoWell part of what made Pipes cool was all the free Yahoo data feeds you could access with it.
- dwrodri 3 years ago
- Glench 3 years agoMy favorite piece which captures some of the wonder of Yahoo Pipes was this essay called My Heart Feeds a Series of Tubes:
https://medium.com/message/my-heart-feeds-a-series-of-tubes-...
- brundolf 3 years agoWas expecting to read about a stunt by the Yahoo beverage company to pump chocolate soda through pipes
Edit: My memory has failed me, that would have been "Yoo-hoo"
- commoner 3 years agon8n (Nodemation) is an excellent self-hosted source-available replacement for Yahoo Pipes with a similar drag-and-drop UI for workflows. You also have the option of using arbitrary JavaScript for data processing.
- newbie789 3 years agoI genuinely miss this site. I had so much fun playing with this as a kid. It’d be cool if they open sourced it!