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Yahoo Pipes End-Of-life Announcement

pipes.yqlblog.net

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Re: Yahoo Pipes End-Of-life Announcement

#61

Post by rokhayakebe »

idlewords wrote: post #27
anigbrowl wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why did it fail, do you think? I thought it was an outstanding product in terms of both functionality and UI, but it never seemed to gain traction.

Several reasons I can think of. For one, no one at Yahoo seemed to understand what Pipes was for (part of a wider problem where Yahoo didn't seem to know what the company was for). For another, Yahoo legal prevented us from doing any kind of long-term storage of RSS feeds. That made the service far less useful than it could have been. Finally, they didn't give it any resources at all. Management was too preoccupied w…

no one at Yahoo seemed to understand what Pipes was for

What was Pipes for?

Re: Yahoo Pipes End-Of-life Announcement

#62

Post by smacktoward »

georgemonck wrote: post #50
idlewords wrote: post #19

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. 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.

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

Re: Yahoo Pipes End-Of-life Announcement

#63

Post by Concours »

matznerd wrote: post #14

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...

Shameless relevant plug: http://www.feedsapi.com might be an option, it'sit's not exactly a replacementbfor pipes but it does a lot of what pipes did and is a work in progress

Re: Yahoo Pipes End-Of-life Announcement

#64

Post by anigbrowl »

WalterGR wrote: post #8
cloud36 wrote: post #4

I wonder how many people still use pipes?

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 calenda…

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.

Re: Yahoo Pipes End-Of-life Announcement

#65

Post by 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/ [2] https://www.rss.com/ [3] http://www.詹姆斯.com/blog/2006/08/rss-dup-detection

Re: Yahoo Pipes End-Of-life Announcement

#67

Post by Concours »

chrisamiller wrote: post #5

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.

Suggestion for your use case: http://www.feedsapi.com , supports keywords and RegEx filtering among other things.

Re: Yahoo Pipes End-Of-life Announcement

#68

Post by maxerickson »

anigbrowl wrote: post #44
maxerickson wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 avail…

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...

Re: Yahoo Pipes End-Of-life Announcement

#69

Post by Toast_ »

psadri wrote: post #15
webwanderings wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please suggest alternate. You built a good thing. RSS overall is becoming history.

IFTTT and Zapier are spiritual successors to Pipes, although their focus is on APIs vs feeds. Maybe start a new, open source version of Pipes?

Try Huginn. I found it very easy to setup and work with. https://github.com/cantino/huginn
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