The Forgotten Yahoo Project That Inspired Two Recently Funded Startups
1–10 of 48 posts
Re: The Forgotten Yahoo Project That Inspired Two Recently Funded Startups
#2I don't think I've ever heard of pipes to be able to have forgotten about it. However, after browsing the website for about 3 seconds I closed the window out of disgust with no idea what the product did. Compare this to IFTTT (which is fairly well known in this sphere) or zapier (which I had never heard of, but could figure it out after a few seconds on the website). It really might be all about presentation. Unfortunately I'm not willing to evaluate evaluate this statement in regard to pipes because I'm not willing to look at their website any longer to see if they actually do what the article claims.
Re: The Forgotten Yahoo Project That Inspired Two Recently Funded Startups
#3Pipes was way ahead of the curve but is also targeted at a moderately more sophisticated audience than the task triggers IFTTT and Zapier. Pipes focus is more about data collection, filtering and transformation -- like Unix pipes vs cron.
BTW, both Pipes and YQL are powered by the same engine and serve billions of requests per day (for both O&O and 3rd parties).
Re: The Forgotten Yahoo Project That Inspired Two Recently Funded Startups
#4I 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 into XPath, and then uses XPath queries to construct an RSS feed. Interesting stuff you can do!
Re: The Forgotten Yahoo Project That Inspired Two Recently Funded Startups
#5The problem with Yahoo Pipes was that it was over-optimized for complex dataflows. It was possible to do things like "find all Flickr photos from user, filter by tag and display on a map by location taken". The result was this crazy programming GUI that resembled Labview.
In practice, few people needed such complex querying and chaining. I think IFTT has a better metaphor ("if this, then that") which is much simpler but covers 80% of useful things.
Re: The Forgotten Yahoo Project That Inspired Two Recently Funded Startups
#6I don't think I've ever heard of pipes to be able to have forgotten about it. However, after browsing the website for about 3 seconds I closed the window out of disgust with no idea what the product did. Compare this to IFTTT (which is fairly well known in this sphere) or zapier (which I had never heard of, but could figure it out after a few seconds on the website). It really might be all about presentation. Unfortu…
There really is some really cool tech "locked up" in these big tech companies. Yahoo Pipes, Google Fusion Tables...
I think startups are, in a way, almost required to unlock the full potential of novel tech ideas. A startup can apply an awesome idea to a niche, gain traction, and expand whereas the defacto launch of a tech product at BigCo X or Y applies the tech across a broad segment of their user base. Broad launches are a good way to make your product generally available, but a bad way to ensure it truly solves some core need your customers have.
Re: The Forgotten Yahoo Project That Inspired Two Recently Funded Startups
#7I 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…
EDIT: er, the URL is: http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.edit?_id=a08134746e30a6dd3...
Re: The Forgotten Yahoo Project That Inspired Two Recently Funded Startups
#8The problem with Yahoo Pipes was that it was over-optimized for complex dataflows. It was possible to do things like "find all Flickr photos from user, filter by tag and display on a map by location taken". The result was this crazy programming GUI that resembled Labview. In practice, few people needed such complex querying and chaining. I think IFTT has a better metaphor ("if this, then that") which is much simpler…
I agree with you that IFTTT and Zapier are simpler solutions to more common needs, but man, Pipes is really powerful. It's more like a language than an automation framework. I don't know if it will ever make any money, but it's a hell of service.
Re: The Forgotten Yahoo Project That Inspired Two Recently Funded Startups
#9YQL is an amazing piece of technology with robust infrastructure to support it. I was first introduced to it at a Yahoo Hackday in Bangalore and since then I’ve used it to to hack up a lot of small scripts. Like this http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/62104
- one that shows torrents links in Wikipedia movie pages(been couple of years since I updated it)
Christian Heilman was the evangelist behind YQL and it gained a lot of traction with him travelling all around to spread word - http://www.yuiblog.com/blog/2010/02/11/video-heilmann-yql/ . But YQL met with a quick death once Christian left Yahoo for Mozilla. Christian was also in the process of writing a book on YQL - http://icant.co.uk/whyyql/
The only major downside to YQL is that most robots.txt block the Yahoo Slurp & Pipes engine; the user agent that powers YQL. E.g. http://stackoverflow.com/robots.txt
YQL has a lot of hidden treasures. Matter of digging the community scripts to understand.
I continued to use YQL at hackathons in Zynga and stopped it when the primary author Nagesh Susarla left Yahoo - http://nagiworld.net/
Recently a Yahoo engineer told me that YQL is now used internally to power all services at Yahoo. So I am pretty sure it going very strong.
Re: The Forgotten Yahoo Project That Inspired Two Recently Funded Startups
#10Pipes was way ahead of the curve but is also targeted at a moderately more sophisticated audience than the task triggers IFTTT and Zapier. Pipes focus is more about data collection, filtering and transformation -- like Unix pipes vs cron. BTW, both Pipes and YQL are powered by the same engine and serve billions of requests per day (for both O&O and 3rd parties).
I'd love to hear more about the engine that powers pipes and YQL. Can you tell us more or let me know where we can read more about it?