
Yahoo Pipes End-Of-life Announcement - michaelhoffman
http://pipes.yqlblog.net/post/120705592639/pipes-end-of-life-announcement
======
brettproctor
Pipes 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.

~~~
product50
Did your remove the affiliate ID?

~~~
scoot
_We chuckled and moved on._

------
idlewords
I 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.

~~~
georgemonck
_It took a lot of active mismanagement and folly to keep Pipes from living up
to its promise._

I would love to read a blog post about how exactly it was mismanaged. It would
be great for others to learn lessons from the mistakes.

~~~
smacktoward
The first rule of Mismanagement Club is you never talk about how you got into
Mismanagement Club.

~~~
clockwerx
Incorrect. The first rule of mismanagement club is to never know exactly how
you got into mismanagement club; but by god you are going to do a bang up job
of it now you are in!

------
psadri
pipes 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.

~~~
smacktoward
Pipes has long been a sort of monument to the faith of a bygone age -- the
first flush of Web 2.0 optimism, when standard formats and open APIs were
going to let us mix and match and mash up services of all kinds at will.

That faith is dead now, of course, scoured from the earth by walled gardens
and VC money. But like Catholics in Elizabethan England, some of us quietly
tend our secret shrines and pray for its return.

(Hopefully that will work out better for us than it did for them.)

~~~
jaza
Love your analogy, sure made me laugh (visualising a geeky dev like myself
tending a weathered gnarly monument in a secluded English glade... in real
life, that is, not in an RPG).

However, why such pessimism? I hardly think that standard formats and open
APIs are dead. Sure, there are some nasty blights upon cyberspace in this
regard (ahem, Facebook, Apple), but other players are still keeping the dream
alive to some extent (e.g. Google, Yahoo).

~~~
detaro
I'd count google mostly as an example of deprecating or limiting useful
interfaces. Yes, you can feed them stuff in "open" formats, but getting stuff
out is harder. First example that comes to mind is youtube APIs, which offered
easier access to stuff. Now try to get a feed of someones videos or similar...

But it is possible that it's confirmation bias + uncommon sample on my part.

~~~
icebraining
_Now try to get a feed of someones videos or similar..._

What do you mean? Channels have an element linking to an RSS feed. In fact,
just pasting a channel URL to an RSS reader should work.

Example of a channel feed:
[https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UCr4soU_...](https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UCr4soU_LrJyGBxhvdVy3qtg)

~~~
detaro
.... true. So they deprecated the methods for it in the API, but it is right
there on the page. Strange.

------
arepb
In 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
There 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
If 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
Many 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
But all of them seem to miss the focus on RSS, or even just the ability to
manipulate feeds.

~~~
justincormack
The whole internet misses the previous focus on RSS...

~~~
tracker1
It's amazing how much a shift of management focus can change things... Google
embraces RSS, develops the premiere online RSS reader, so good that even stand
alone readers are largely abandoned... then google nukes RSS support from
Chrome, and shutters Reader. And the world is worse off for it.

It definitely inspires a "never forget" kind of mindset, such that I don't
trust relying on a SaaS that I don't have a personal exit strategy for.

~~~
awad
Twitter took RSS as a concept and humanized it

~~~
pestaa
RSS is an open format, Twitter is a walled garden.

------
Animats
Most 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
I 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.

------
denimboy
Yahoo 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
Correct 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.

------
bryanh
Aw 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
You 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.

~~~
stevenjohns
I 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/)

------
danso
Yahoo 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._

------
shavenwarthog2
I 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
Ah, 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)

------
Volt
I'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=0e19519adf0515251...](http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.info?_id=0e19519adf051525192d459e8249e833)

Thanks to whoever made it. I guess I'll have to find a way to do it myself
now.

~~~
bbrian
The 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!

------
juliendorra
I 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.

------
matznerd
Who 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
I 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_
I'm too far away for coffee, but my email address is in my profile.

------
donnellyp
Just 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.

~~~
donnellyp
Thanks 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.

------
chrisamiller
Oh 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
Are 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.

~~~
anigbrowl
_YQL 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.

~~~
maxerickson
Yeah, I wasn't suggesting that YQL was equivalent to Pipes, just that it might
be able to replace the functionality. Which is why I made sure to mention the
significant difference...

------
kentbrew
While 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?

------
donretag
I 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
I 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).

------
tomsoderlund
I'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

------
bootload
I 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)

------
wiresurfer
I 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.

------
FractalNerve
One 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

------
joshstrange
This 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?

------
spdustin
As 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
In 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.

------
bluesmoon
My website is partially powered by pipes. Looks like I'll have to rewrite.

------
michaelhoffman
I figured this was going to happen years ago. Any suggestions for a
replacement?

~~~
atourgates
Platforms like IFTTT Zapier have worked well for me, though they're certainly
not direct 1:1 replacements.

------
chinpokomon
So 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.

------
xefer
I 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.

------
juxtio
Sorry 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.

------
pjbrunet
If 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.

------
interactiv
I'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.

------
Aissen
I 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.

------
callumjones
I 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.

------
bootload
Using 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/)

------
ChrisArchitect
back 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.

------
jccalhoun
Sad 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!)

------
llamataboot
Yahoo 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.

------
nreece
Disappointing news. But, if you're just looking at creating custom feeds for
webpages, then try out Feedity - [https://feedity.com](https://feedity.com)

------
waldr
Pipes 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.

------
jotm
Aw 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...

------
donatj
As the one person still using Yahoo Pipes, I'm rather saddened by this. Does
this also imply an eventual end to YQL I wonder?

------
s0me0ne
Pipes gui was revolutionary when it came out and to me is invaluable. Shame to
see it and rss die out from mass appeal :(

------
flinty
There was an awesome pipe which allowed you to get a rss feed of commentators
you want to subscribe to. Sadly no more

------
cloud36
I wonder how many people still use pipes?

~~~
WalterGR
One 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
_Unfortunately 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.

------
pknerd
Sad to hear that. I guess Pipes was the first and probably the last innovative
product ever shipped by Yahoo!

------
tomcam
Pipes was awesome. But was there ever a credible strategy to monetize it? Does
anyone on HN have any ideas?

------
gsam
First Google Reader and now Pipes? What's the problem with RSS and please tell
me what's better?

------
UserRights
please open source it, thank you!

------
ing33k
in 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.

------
orliesaurus
Thanks for your service! You've done great!

------
bitwize
Web mashup! Hey, remember the late 2000s?

------
paulhauggis
This is why I just roll my own data mining tools.

