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The Forgotten Yahoo Project That Inspired Two Recently Funded Startups

nickoneill.com

11–20 of 48 posts

Re: The Forgotten Yahoo Project That Inspired Two Recently Funded Startups

#11
I (and probably sriramk too) am disappointed the article didn't mention Microsoft Popfly: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Popfly

Popfly was a more consumer centric mash up tool built by a little skunk works team inside of Microsoft's Developer Division.

Re: The Forgotten Yahoo Project That Inspired Two Recently Funded Startups

#12
Pipes is maybe the only yahoo product I actually use. It's only for one frivolous thing though. Failblog (part of Cheezeburger I think? Doesn't really matter) Used to have a sub-blog called Hacked IRL. They shut it down a while back, but they still occasionally post clearly labelled Hacked IRL stories to the main Failblog. Since I liked Hacked IRL but really didn't want to have the whole fail blog feed subscribed, and I remembered having heard of Yahoo Pipes years before that, I looked it up and it was sure enough still around.

The result was this: http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.info?_id=5ead4957874f5a670...

Which is simply the fail blog feed filtered down to only posts containing "Hacked IRL" in the subject. I have the RSS of that subscribed.

Like I said, frivolous. But it only took a few minutes to put together even having never used pipes before.

Re: The Forgotten Yahoo Project That Inspired Two Recently Funded Startups

#13
post #3

Pipes was way ahead of the curve but is also targeted at a moderately more sophisticated audience than the task triggers IFTTT and Zapier. Pipes focus is more about data collection, filtering and transformation -- like Unix pipes vs cron. BTW, both Pipes and YQL are powered by the same engine and serve billions of requests per day (for both O&O and 3rd parties).

The day Pipes launched was quite eventful. There was some very "creative" code in there that wasn't really designed to take the traffic it received on launch. Completely different today and I still use its cousin YQL for many things.

Re: The Forgotten Yahoo Project That Inspired Two Recently Funded Startups

#14
Nobody seems to have mentioned - Kapow/OpenKapow - http://kapowsoftware.com - Dapper - http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/dapper_quest_to_unlock_...

I remember giving up on YPipes back then because it was always down (or denied access). Did more with Dapper and OK

Re: The Forgotten Yahoo Project That Inspired Two Recently Funded Startups

#15
I found pipes/YQL very useful for doing some ajaxy things with sites and services that are not on your domain (since most browsers don't allow for cross-domain ajax calls, you can request a JSON version of a site's markup via YQL). However I didn't find the service 100% reliable. It will be great to have more services like this out there.

Re: The Forgotten Yahoo Project That Inspired Two Recently Funded Startups

#16
The Pipes/IFTTT concept screams for a more open solution, it's too important to be proprietary. I'm always frustrated when I want to use IFTTT but they don't support the services I need.

A simple protocol based on HTTP, JSON, and WebHooks could be pretty slick.

Re: The Forgotten Yahoo Project That Inspired Two Recently Funded Startups

#17

Nobody seems to have mentioned - Kapow/OpenKapow - http://kapowsoftware.com - Dapper - http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/dapper_quest_to_unlock_... I remember giving up on YPipes back then because it was always down (or denied access). Did more with Dapper and OK

Yes, once I used Dapper more than Pipes http://open.dapper.net/

Re: The Forgotten Yahoo Project That Inspired Two Recently Funded Startups

#19

The Pipes/IFTTT concept screams for a more open solution, it's too important to be proprietary. I'm always frustrated when I want to use IFTTT but they don't support the services I need. A simple protocol based on HTTP, JSON, and WebHooks could be pretty slick.

The protocol only gets you so far though. I'd argue that our (I work at IFTTT) value exists at a level above that. I would love a standard though, it would make my job waayyy easier.

Re: The Forgotten Yahoo Project That Inspired Two Recently Funded Startups

#20
There are many good projects and services out there that scare/annoy away potential users by whacking a "register or login" box in their face just before things get interesting.

My identity isn't "free" and managing yet another account comes with a burden (another password to remember or store somewhere, another security risk).

Whoever thought that creating pipes (i.e. experimenting) without logging in was somehow detrimental to Yahoo's business interests(?), had things backwards.

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