Show HN: Mashups – Resurrecting Yahoo Pipes, my side project • Hacker News Board

Show HN: Mashups – Resurrecting Yahoo Pipes, my side project

#1

Post by pyromaker » Mon, Jan 06, 2025, 11:54 AM UTC

Hey everyone.

For those who remember, Yahoo Pipes was a tool to mashup RSS feeds back in the good ole' days. :)

I really loved that tool, but of course, it was shut down.

Since then I know there's been a few tools and attempts at bringing it back.

I always wanted to create Yahoo Pipes clone myself.

So here is my small side project - Mashups.io

https://www.mashups.io

It's an MVP at the moment and well, let's see where it goes.

Thanks all!

Show HN: Mashups – Resurrecting Yahoo Pipes, my side project
mashups.io

Re: Show HN: Mashups – Resurrecting Yahoo Pipes, my side project

#2

Post by Xeoncross » Mon, Jan 06, 2025, 2:35 PM UTC

I used Yahoo! Pipes to make a consolidated social feed some years ago (https://github.com/Xeoncross/MicroStream). It actually placed as an honorable mention in AListAparts 10k challenge.

It was really fun to have a service that could handle all the backend requests for you before sites like Zapier existed.

Re: Show HN: Mashups – Resurrecting Yahoo Pipes, my side project

#3

Post by arkensaw » Mon, Jan 06, 2025, 2:36 PM UTC

I miss yahoo pipes! I used to use it to aggregate movie reviews for some project I was working on. Brings me back.

Re: Show HN: Mashups – Resurrecting Yahoo Pipes, my side project

#4

Post by bewal416 » Mon, Jan 06, 2025, 2:39 PM UTC

Cool project! Yahoo Pipes was before my time, but I remember a Tom Scott video that mentioned it. Imagine having a service like that for free today…

This video has … views by Tom Scott: https://youtu.be/BxV14h0kFs0?si=J3sVKEJhkABUSjN_

Re: Show HN: Mashups – Resurrecting Yahoo Pipes, my side project

#5

Post by xnx » Mon, Jan 06, 2025, 2:49 PM UTC

Also check out https://nodered.org/ and https://github.com/huginn/huginn if you're interested in free and open-source software you can run yourself.

Re: Show HN: Mashups – Resurrecting Yahoo Pipes, my side project

#6

Post by smarx007 » Mon, Jan 06, 2025, 3:11 PM UTC

xnx wrote: post #5

Also check out https://nodered.org/ and https://github.com/huginn/huginn if you're interested in free and open-source software you can run yourself.

Is there a consolidated comparison website for these? There is also n8n that is on the rise now.

Re: Show HN: Mashups – Resurrecting Yahoo Pipes, my side project

#7

Post by strawhatdev » Mon, Jan 06, 2025, 3:39 PM UTC

For some reason, on mobile, the demo and pricing links in the navbar get me a 404. Works fine on desktop.

Re: Show HN: Mashups – Resurrecting Yahoo Pipes, my side project

#8

Post by mapt » Mon, Jan 06, 2025, 4:02 PM UTC

I played with pipes for a minute to manage an RSS ecosystem, but didn't build anything that I kept around.

The site seems to be down.

Let's say we all build wonderful apps on this, and then you run out of money or legal liability for hosting.

Is there a way to construct this so that we can export our Pipes to some standard format that the next person to pick up the torch could activate, and migrate to that?

Re: Show HN: Mashups – Resurrecting Yahoo Pipes, my side project

#9

Post by raphar » Mon, Jan 06, 2025, 4:17 PM UTC

Brings me back too. But what stayed stuck on my memory, was something i read here on HN: at some point, one yahoo dev added his affiliate code to the links !!

Re: Show HN: Mashups – Resurrecting Yahoo Pipes, my side project

#10

Post by Nzen » Mon, Jan 06, 2025, 4:34 PM UTC

bewal416 wrote: post #4

Cool project! Yahoo Pipes was before my time, but I remember a Tom Scott video that mentioned it. Imagine having a service like that for free today… This video has … views by Tom Scott: https://youtu.be/BxV14h0kFs0?si=J3sVKEJhkABUSjN_

Along the same lines, I recommend Retool's retrospective article [0] about pipes, for some of the perspective on how it looked from inside yahoo. I'll grant that, towards the end, it is an ad for their service.

[0] https://retool.com/pipes