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Yahoo Pipes

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Re: Yahoo Pipes

#91

Post by kentbrew »

p0sixlang wrote: post #74
kentbrew wrote: post #60

As a fresh Yahoo! Developer Network employee I was the person who blabbed about the top-secret _callback parameter the weekend Pipes launched, which caused the service to be taken offline for capacity upgrade. 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 F…

What were the implications of knowing the _callback parameter?

At that point in history APIs that returned a JSON object wrapped in a callback were few and far between (and Yahoo! had almost all of them). Pipes would give you anything you wanted in a callback, allowing for nothing-but-front-end mashups of anything that would hold still while being scraped.

Craigslist banned Pipes and un-banned it after YDN employee Jeremy Zawodny went to work there:

https://techcrunch.com/2009/12/01/craigslist-yahoo-pipes-fli... https://techcrunch.com/2009/12/16/craigslist-yahoo-pipes/

Re: Yahoo Pipes

#92

Post by t0mbstone »

plusfour wrote: post #53
t0mbstone wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Node-RED?

Oh wow! You are right! This is very similar. Thanks

Re: Yahoo Pipes

#93

Post by egfx »

egfx wrote: post #18

Ah pipes. Thanks for the memories of a product that both came and went before it’s time. And technologically an amazing frontend web app. There is an attempt to remake pipes https://pipes.digital

I really wish the pipes.digital project was open source. It could have really gone somewhere. Without it being open source, it seems to have gone the way of yahoo pipes itself. : /

Re: Yahoo Pipes

#94

Post by madrox »

peteforde wrote: post #36
madrox wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You're more than likely thinking of Seth Fitzsimmons: https://twitter.com/mojodna

Re: Yahoo Pipes

#95

Post by donnellyp »

psadri wrote: post #54
brettproctor wrote: post #50

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…

Heh... just chiming in to say the affiliate person wasn’t me :-)

i know who it is, but i'll never tell :)

Re: Yahoo Pipes

#97

Post by Breza »

chatmasta wrote: post #51
stevenjohns wrote: post #24

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…

People are still doing this, only now it's reddit -> instagram.

Not to mention Reddit -> Reddit I'm amazed at how successful some crosspost bots are.
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