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Yahoo Pipes End-Of-life Announcement

pipes.yqlblog.net

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Re: Yahoo Pipes End-Of-life Announcement

#81

Post by bbrian »

Volt wrote: post #20

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

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

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

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!

Re: Yahoo Pipes End-Of-life Announcement

#82

Post by bbrian »

shavenwarthog2 wrote: post #74

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!

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)

Re: Yahoo Pipes End-Of-life Announcement

#83

Post by brador »

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…

> legal prevented us from doing any kind of long-term storage of RSS feeds

Wait, is there something legally wrong about storing RSS feed data?

Re: Yahoo Pipes End-Of-life Announcement

#84

Post by 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.

Re: Yahoo Pipes End-Of-life Announcement

#85

Post by fletchowns »

brettproctor wrote: post #34

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 t…

> had his affiliate id in all of those links

Wow that must have added up to quite the haul

Re: Yahoo Pipes End-Of-life Announcement

#86

Post by billybobza »

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?

Instead of closing it down, releasing the source and giving it to the community could breath live into it. I remember being blown away by it, the fact that it was neglected and just kept on says a lot about it's good design.

Re: Yahoo Pipes End-Of-life Announcement

#87

Post by Someone1234 »

brettproctor wrote: post #34

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 t…

I wonder if they had put in a Yahoo! owned affiliate link, if the site would not still be operating (and self-funding) today...

Re: Yahoo Pipes End-Of-life Announcement

#89

Post by deskglass »

cloud36 wrote: post #4

I wonder how many people still use pipes?

I used a pipe that created RSS feeds from Google+ pages in conjunction with some other stuff to get all the articles I'd want to read in one document (with a table of contents) delivered to my kindle. I'm now working on something that doesn't use Y! Pipes and simplifies the process.

We all knew it was coming, but the end of Pipes still sucks.

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