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Pipes was _awesome_. I built many personal services with it - (and even a few low traffic production services!) Really tragic they killed it, that's when I knew the Mayer era of Yahoo would be nothing more than a hatchet job. I wish they made it F/OSS as part of the shutdown. Nothing has filled the void.
It was well documented, fully-featured, had a great web dashboard, and most importantly of all it was super stable.
Not sure if it shut down or if it just became irrelevant in the modern web. But many a engineering student plugged into it to make "hello world" weather apps.
You could ensure only top content made it by setting a minimum karma limit. It was a way of producing content 24/7.
I only did a couple of trial pages to test out the concept -- I never made any money from it nor had any intention to monetize -- but I'm almost completely certain that it was a method used by dozens of blackhats to make autoblogs for the purposes of ad revenue. You could even fake a comment history or have a "unique" title by selecting the top comments from the Reddit posts. Once you have one recipe down, you can just copy it for other subreddits. And there was an endless amount of hyper-focused niche subreddits that you can instantly plug into.
Fun times.
To this day, I am still bewildered and not just a little angry about how Yahoo's entire M&A machine was really just a catch-and-kill trap for taking the most promising ideas out of the ecosystem and slowly resource starving them into irrelevance.
I was at the O'Reilly Emerging Tech conference session that functioned as (what I remember to have been) the Pipes launch party. Everyone involved with the project seemed young and full of optimism, and while they didn't know exactly how Pipes would make money, I remember being as impressed with the UI as I was the forward-thinking ideas that motivated the project. Keep in mind that in 2006, IE 6 was still omnipresen…
In a lot of ways that tech was all ahead of its time. It's a shame the monetization schemes weren't similarly evolved. If it were, Yahoo may still be more relevant today.
Pipes was such a good product and sorely missed. Is there anything equivalent to it today?
IFTTT, Zapier, Webflow, integromat etc.
I have now found that https://feedity.com/ does a good enough job scraping pages to produce feeds. I then run that through https://fivefilters.org/content-only/ to fetch the full content of the page and read it in https://www.inoreader.com/, my favorite Google Reader clone.
Some people are amazed that I am always on top of new content they produce.
Pipes was such a good product and sorely missed. Is there anything equivalent to it today?