51–60 of 97 posts
I used Yahoo! Pipes in a somewhat greyhat way. I started pulling in data from Reddit's RSS feeds for certain subreddits and using that to create and post content for fairly spammy Twitter, Tumblr and Facebook pages. I'd parse the titles (for example, change things like "cake day" to "birthday") and adding hashtags at the end. You could ensure only top content made it by setting a minimum karma limit. It was a way of…
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.
As someone who just briefly used Pipes for a couple of things and don't remember the service fully: What unique features of Pipes do you remember that nothing else been able to replicate?
You could make HTTP REST requests to pretty much anything and parse the result and do whatever you wanted with it.
You could use Yahoo pipes to glue APIs together.
If you were the creative sort, the possibilities were endless.
Can you name another product currently on the market that can do that?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
As someone who just briefly used Pipes for a couple of things and don't remember the service fully: What unique features of Pipes do you remember that nothing else been able to replicate?
A drag-and-drop engine for building extract/transform/load machines that ran in the cloud at no cost? You could make HTTP REST requests to pretty much anything and parse the result and do whatever you wanted with it. You could use Yahoo pipes to glue APIs together. If you were the creative sort, the possibilities were endless. Can you name another product currently on the market that can do that?
A couple of fun behind the scenes stories which I think at this point are past the statute of limitations. Source: I was the Service Engineer on pipes for around a year or so. 1) When you went to the pipes landing page, there were a few demo pipes to show people what was possible. One of them combined search results from say ebay/craiglist/amazon to show prices for things. One day I was looking through the source of…
We used server side javascript (before Node, I like to think we were ahead of our time, our own fork of Spidermonkey with network and other server code!). We used OPML as a container format with tags in them analogous to html tags. The "pipes" in our system were much more like unix pipes, where the output of one script could be the input to another. In the running script you could access the feed with a customized "Feed Dom" with items and do manipulations.
With grazr's real-time freshness, feed normalization and database it worked amazingly well. We never were able to get people to understand it (it was super nerdy). I built some pretty amazing apps with it, unfortunately none of it exists anymore :).
Yahoo pipes seemed like the sign of the end for Grazr though. Since we had a widget and feed display tech. a _lot_ of people wired their pipes to grazr's widgets for display and publishing. We saw an initial "burst" on pipes announce and then saw the yahoo pipes usage drop pretty fast and never really recover. As a proxy, it looked like there wasn't enough "there" there to continue to pursue our programming environment.
I still miss it though, it was fun to work on.
Oh boy do I remember yahoo pipes. I used it heavily for some time. I always suspected their servers were under massive load running all their jobs so sometimes things were slow. Pipes made you think the future of the web was going to be technical and brilliant.
Oh well, that was at least half right.
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I remember that ETech. Back when Yahoo was doing a bunch of things that were cool and not profit-driven, like FireEagle. 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.
I met one of the FireEagle devs there, at the same ETech event, and he was a really great person. We proceeded to bump into each other a few more times over the years, specifically at the Ajax Experience conferences. He really tried to convince me that Yahoo wasn't all that bad, although he eventually did have to move on. As evidenced by the previous paragraph, I've forgotten his name which makes it exceptionally dif…
I had an interesting series of voicemails, ranging from "dude, WTF?" to "okay, we need to talk to you right away" to "we're pretty sure you're fired" but ending with "hey, Tim O'Reilly picked it up and ALL IS FORGIVEN THANK YOU!!!"
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