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Yahoo Pipes End-Of-life Announcement

pipes.yqlblog.net

21–30 of 184 posts

Re: Yahoo Pipes End-Of-life Announcement

#21
I can understand why Pipes would be shut down by Yahoo, it was a impressive technical feat but it definitely appealed to very small developer focused crowd.

I feel like IFTTT is our best bet, while it doesn't do the "Unix pipe" that pipes offered it at least provides some usability to the process.

Re: Yahoo Pipes End-Of-life Announcement

#22
post #6

pipes creator here: sad to see pipes shutdown. i am surprised it lasted this long -- it was abandoned years ago. on the positive side, it is nice to see it mentioned in the same sentence as y! maps which used to be a big deal back in the day.

Thank you for the great work.

Re: Yahoo Pipes End-Of-life Announcement

#23
Sad but not expected. It was really powerful but, like most people, I stopped using it years ago. It kept breaking either due to the sites I was using it with changing things or the service being neglected (and my limited ability to understand how it worked!)

Re: Yahoo Pipes End-Of-life Announcement

#25

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.

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.

Maybe they're focusing on YQL instead, if it does offer similar functionality.

Re: Yahoo Pipes End-Of-life Announcement

#26
If I was looking for a replacement, maybe I'd look for an RSS aggregation plugin for WordPress? Personally, I have my own PHP code that will slice and dice feeds however I want.

I got about halfway through building a "news blend" app where you tap just the categories you want and it would blend all the latest articles from just your categories into one news feed and email that to you daily. But we never finished it.

Re: Yahoo Pipes End-Of-life Announcement

#27
post #6

pipes creator here: sad to see pipes shutdown. i am surprised it lasted this long -- it was abandoned years ago. on the positive side, it is nice to see it mentioned in the same sentence as y! maps which used to be a big deal back in the day.

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 with the failed Brickhouse project (internal startup incubator) and the host of failed ideas that it spawned.

Re: Yahoo Pipes End-Of-life Announcement

#28

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…

Thanks :)

Pipes's interface is primary the work of Jonathan Trevor, with lots of help from Daniel Raffel, Ed Ho and others.

Re: Yahoo Pipes End-Of-life Announcement

#29

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 feel like this unique blend will be Yahoo's lasting contribution to the field of management theory.

Re: Yahoo Pipes End-Of-life Announcement

#30
post #15

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?

It really would be oh so nice to have something that can ingest RSS and Tweets and then apply filters to them while visualizing the logic through a graphical interface. Maybe even some fuzzy machine learning to use in building filters. Some more advanced dupe technology would go a long way. People would be building their own techmemes in no time. You could build ranking systems that award bonus points if something like longform or techmeme mention something.

Maybe im dreaming about a free version of Percolate, which I have heard is really cool.

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