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Yahoo Pipes End-Of-life Announcement

pipes.yqlblog.net

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Re: Yahoo Pipes End-Of-life Announcement

#111

Post by wutbrodo »

meatysnapper wrote: post #76
georgemonck wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Get a job at Twitter and you can see this in action. It's pretty epic.

I think most/many people could reasonably say this about their company; I currently work at Google and feel quite the same. I'm not convinced that either Google or Twitter[1] qualify as a particularly spectacular example of mismanagement though.

[1] I don't have first-hand experience but one of my best friends work there and we regularly vent to each other about work complaints.

Re: Yahoo Pipes End-Of-life Announcement

#112

Post by [deleted] »

meatysnapper wrote: post #76
georgemonck wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Get a job at Twitter and you can see this in action. It's pretty epic.

[deleted]

Re: Yahoo Pipes End-Of-life Announcement

#113

Post by psadri »

denimboy wrote: post #108

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…

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.

Re: Yahoo Pipes End-Of-life Announcement

#114

Post by aleem »

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…

I'll echo those sentiments, the UI for that time certainly had a wow factor.

> With any kind of support, or even benign neglect, the product would have been successful.

Look at IFTTT services now and it's easy to realize that pipes even in its original incarnation could have been so much more given its brain dead UI ease.

It's a shame that Yahoo is shutting this down rather than pivoting it as an IFTTT or similar. I'd wager that it's lack of ownership that makes it hard to pivot. I also don't recall it having a premium tier which has got to weigh down the resources--talent always gravitates toward revenue centers it seems.

Re: Yahoo Pipes End-Of-life Announcement

#115

Post by 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.

Re: Yahoo Pipes End-Of-life Announcement

#116

Post by ris »

arepb wrote: post #7

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

Too true.

The only thing Pipes would need is a .io domain and it could be dressed up as the Next Cool Thing which LargeCorp is desperate to get its hands on to prove it's still cool.

Re: Yahoo Pipes End-Of-life Announcement

#117

Post by 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.

Re: Yahoo Pipes End-Of-life Announcement

#118

Post by edho »

donnellyp wrote: post #73

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…

Thanks for all of your work. Wouldn't have been the same without you.

Re: Yahoo Pipes End-Of-life Announcement

#120

Post by TheGRS »

Touche wrote: post #39
arepb wrote: post #7

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

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/

I liked the concept and probably didn't give it a fair shake, but it flooded me with notifications and I just didn't want to take the time to tweak it to my needs. Its one of those apps you need a good tutorial (from someone other than the creators) to walk you through useful functionality and setup.
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