The Forgotten Yahoo Project That Inspired Two Recently Funded Startups • Hacker News Board

Re: The Forgotten Yahoo Project That Inspired Two Recently Funded Startups

#41

Post by AlphaDex » Tue, Aug 28, 2012, 1:09 PM UTC

sabat wrote: post #4

I uses Yahoo Pipes for a project of mine—I depend on it, in fact. It's really useful if you're doing something service-based, say, if you need to make an RSS feed out of a website, or otherwise manipulate data. YQL (Yahoo Query Language) is more than a gimmick; it's useful. It does seem to be under active development, and I hope it lives. EDIT: here's an example Pipe that fetches a web page (Pinterest) and turns it i…

I also depend on pipes. If pipes ever goes away, coding it all by hand would be a horrible pain...

Re: The Forgotten Yahoo Project That Inspired Two Recently Funded Startups

#42

Post by wslh » Tue, Aug 28, 2012, 1:19 PM UTC

tlrobinson wrote: post #16

The Pipes/IFTTT concept screams for a more open solution, it's too important to be proprietary. I'm always frustrated when I want to use IFTTT but they don't support the services I need. A simple protocol based on HTTP, JSON, and WebHooks could be pretty slick.

The approach that I am working on is a web orchestration language. You can write s-expressions specifying the dataflow. Obviously alternative frontends can be built to output the s-expression.

I published more information on:

- Ideas: Egont, A Web Orchestration Language: http://blog.databigbang.com/ideas-egont-a-web-orchestration-...

- Egont Part II: http://blog.databigbang.com/egont-part-ii/

Re: The Forgotten Yahoo Project That Inspired Two Recently Funded Startups

#43

Post by mehdim » Tue, Aug 28, 2012, 3:27 PM UTC

Yahoo pipes is great. And new automation platforms are fun and useful for non developers. But if you want to be completely freewhen programming the web, let APIs to developers.

http://api500.tumblr.com/post/28165124923/your-mashup-is-so-...

Re: The Forgotten Yahoo Project That Inspired Two Recently Funded Startups

#44

Post by justinhj » Tue, Aug 28, 2012, 3:36 PM UTC

lazyjones wrote: post #20

There are many good projects and services out there that scare/annoy away potential users by whacking a "register or login" box in their face just before things get interesting. My identity isn't "free" and managing yet another account comes with a burden (another password to remember or store somewhere, another security risk). Whoever thought that creating pipes (i.e. experimenting) without logging in was somehow de…

Perhaps the login requirement was needed to prevent, or atleast reduce, abuse.

Re: The Forgotten Yahoo Project That Inspired Two Recently Funded Startups

#45

Post by vmialik » Tue, Aug 28, 2012, 4:53 PM UTC

The title made me think. Is there a place or archives where companies leave their forgotten or dead projects that they tried and moved on? Is there any HN's that dug up a failed project and turned it into a successful company/project?

Re: The Forgotten Yahoo Project That Inspired Two Recently Funded Startups

#46

Post by lop » Tue, Aug 28, 2012, 9:30 PM UTC

Does everybody trust into these hosted services? (I do not.) How about to run your own one? - http://pipes.deri.org - still alive or dead? - https://github.com/ggaughan/pipe2py - looks alive - http://neyric.github.com/webhookit/docs/index.html - Alpha and dead? - swiftly.org - started as a open source project, but nothing released and dead?

Did I forgot something/somebody?

Just to be complete, GUI as a JS lib: - http://jsplumb.org/jquery/demo.html - http://neyric.github.com/wireit

And additionally two commercial hosted projects: - http://www.wewiredweb.com (based on http://www.mashablelogic.com) - http://tarpipe.com/

Re: The Forgotten Yahoo Project That Inspired Two Recently Funded Startups

#47

Post by lurker14 » Wed, Aug 29, 2012, 4:37 AM UTC

sneak wrote: post #23

tlrobinson wrote: post #16

The Pipes/IFTTT concept screams for a more open solution, it's too important to be proprietary. I'm always frustrated when I want to use IFTTT but they don't support the services I need. A simple protocol based on HTTP, JSON, and WebHooks could be pretty slick.

It would be nice if someone would make a painfully simple interface (a la the "requests" python module) for doing XMPP. Perhaps though XMPP is just too much of a quagmire.

https://developers.google.com/appengine/articles/using_xmpp ?

Re: The Forgotten Yahoo Project That Inspired Two Recently Funded Startups

#48

Post by joshu » Wed, Aug 29, 2012, 8:10 AM UTC

aaronbrethorst wrote: post #29

joshu wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Never heard of it. Because it is silverlight, never would have been able to run it. Sounds like it did a lot less according to http://blog.jonudell.net/2008/02/14/popfly-and-pipes/ Lemme guess, you worked on it?

Of course! No other reason to mention a Microsoft project that's been dead for four years otherwise :)

Hah. Well, you shipped something. I have to imagine that's incredibly hard.