Yahoo Pipes

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo!_Pipes

by elsewhen • 4 years ago

159 57 4 years ago

en.wikipedia.org

zegerjan• 4 years ago

What’s not quite clear from the wiki page: was Yahoo too early? With the related tools on the page being so successful it seems that way.

robertlagrant2• 4 years ago

Too early and didn't want to be a tech company. If Google had made this, we'd probably all be using it.

Still, at least Yahoo has a great exclamation mark in the logo now.

smcl3• 4 years ago

At the risk of appearing to take a cheap shot - I think if this was built at Google there’s a good chance it would’ve been abandoned or cancelled there too

pell• 4 years ago

I've used it briefly. I don't necessarily think it was too early but it was such a niche tool, hard to find, barely advertised to its potential target group, lacked documentation, demos and a community. I think, it was simply a result of Yahoo's chaotic product management at that time. They had a few gems that didn't get the attention they deserved - internally and from the public.

sourcecodeplz• 4 years ago

Are you referring to Zapier & IFTTT?

I find them quite limited but I understand the need and also that not everyone can parse a structured response. It's nice that they have free versions though.

Although more complicated to use but also free, I get a lot more functionality from PythonAnywhere, Cloudflare Workers or Oracle Cloud free tier.

thrwaway2365• 4 years ago

(disclaimer: former Yahoo employee)

Yahoo at the time was clearly underestimated from a developer point of view. Everyone just saw them losing ground to Google in web search, but they had a really strong development team at the time. Lots of great stuff was open sourced, even though they did not win the same status as Google

- YUI was a really good frontend framework based on components and events. It was so easy to create complex interfaces compared to others at the time.

- Hadoop open sourced big data management

- Vespa was a really good search engine in terms of performance and functionality. It seems to still be alive at http://vespa.ai

- They provided several useful APIs without the restrictions that Google and others often placed on their products.

They made some bad strategic decisions and other business decisions, but they had a lot of exciting technology that was often overlooked.

ignoramous• 4 years ago

Yahoo should have pivoted from "web services" to IaaS like Amazon did with AWS, because it was no secret that Y! employed some of the best data-center folks besides Google and Microsoft. Could have been a different story?

Terretta• 4 years ago

We used all these. Also Pipes. Thank you for your service. :-)

// YUI was underrated.

toast0• 4 years ago

I was at Yahoo from 2004-2011. Yahoo often had products before the market was ready for them. Sometimes, the product would hang on and grow with the market; sometimes it would get shut down.

In some cases, like mobile, Yahoo was both too early and too late.

There was a good amount of time where Yahoo would launch something, shut it down, then Google would launch the same thing to much success. Of course, now Google is in the habit of shutting things down, another thing Yahoo did first ;)

I used to think there'd be a lot of value in going through Yahoo PR launches from N years ago and if Yahoo had shut it down, consider if it makes sense as an independent business. Although it can be hard to tell why they shut things down, so it might not be obvious which things were the product worked but the market wasn't there and which things had non-obvious issues that made the product unworkable in practice.

samwillis• 4 years ago

Yahoo Pipes was awesome and born from the dream of an open web with open protocols and APIs. It was sad that this vision died and we ended up with so many closed "walled gardens".

I hope we see a resurgence of this ideal, the recent expanse and interest in Mastodon, the Fediverse, and ActivityPub give me hope.

Matt Mullenweg has committed to adding ActivityPub to Tumblr [0], if others in the established web ecosystem also make such moves maybe this will happen!

0: https://twitter.com/photomatt/status/1594577983028740096

lycos3• 4 years ago

I've started working on a custom ActivityPub implementation because I am interested by it, but I have to say my impressions so far is that it is more complicated to implement than I originally expected. I find the docs lacking, the test suite hasn't worked in a long time, either. Someone even made a document explaining how to read the relevant specs[0]

Right now Mastodon seems to be the biggest player, but curious what the second/third biggest would be? Pleroma? Having Tumblr add compatibility seems like it could be huge.

[0] https://tinysubversions.com/notes/reading-activitypub/

davidy123• 4 years ago

https://semapps.org/ looks interesting to take on a whole "ball of wax" at a useful level of knowledge. Would like to hear your thoughts.

mariusor• 4 years ago

The sad situation is that most of the devs hurried into building applications that speak ActivityPub instead of creating libraries that can be used by others.

If you're working with go, I created some libraries that are overlayed over the specification pretty closely. You can find them at github.com/go-ap

mxuribe• 4 years ago

...Right now Mastodon seems to be the biggest player, but curious what the second/third biggest would be?

Between 2008 through about 2016, it was tough to state which was the most widely used (oh, you'll get opinions, just not sure if stuff was tightly tracked)...But after 2016 - when mastodon came onto the fediverse scene - it certainly has been the most popular software to use. As far as which is second...well that depends on whether you count number of nodes on the Fedi, or numbers of users who use a particular software stack. If matrix federated network is excluded from any list, then second might be peertube nodes (https://the-federation.info/#projects). But if counting by number of users, then second might be diaspora (https://fediverse.observer/stats). Of course, the Fedi being what it is, numbers - while likely good - are only approximations...these data only tell a tip of the iceberg. I mean, the fediverse has been around - and active - since around 2008, so you can only imagine there is some small percentage of Fedi instance admins who prefer not to be counted. So, stat sites like i cited will give you an idea, but not exact numbers. ;-)

mro_name• 4 years ago

go to e.g. irc.w3.org #social and claim it. We would be +1 then.

breck• 4 years ago

It was sad that this vision died and we ended up with so many closed "walled gardens". I hope we see a resurgence of this ideal

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CYPYZnVQoLg

jumelles• 4 years ago

Don’t forget Wikidata

the100rabh• 4 years ago

I have been using NodeRed for past couple of year, running off my RPi. I must say, its been very a good replacement for Yahoo Pipes

piva00• 4 years ago

What a trip to memory lane this brought me to.

I actually used Yahoo Pipes at a job back in 2008, the concept of data mashups was really interesting and we tried applying it to mesh our GIS data with other sources to mashup and enrich the results from our databases.

I don't remember much from that project but do remember having fun with Yahoo Pipes interface, I had completely forgotten about it until this popped up.

CrypticShift2• 4 years ago

This dream of no-code web data extraction and manipulation is still alive.

The best example I've seen is https://www.bardeen.ai/ : a local-first in-browser solid collection of automations commands and integrations workflows.

The future, though, will more likely look like this https://www.adept.ai/act

ca1232• 4 years ago

Encourage you to take a look at https://docs.composable.ai

CrypticShift2• 4 years ago

This is more of a Business BI/Analytics low-code solution than a personal no code one.

But you indeed took a similar dataflow approach, which could be considered "unique" in BI/Analytics.

Good Luck!

arjvik• 4 years ago

How did Yahoo Pipes compare to Zapier or IFTTT?

aloisdg• 4 years ago

IMHO, Yahoo pipes UI and UX where far better than IFTTT. I don't know about Zapier.

nixcraft• 4 years ago

Another fun story: For the longest time the Yahoo pipes front page had an example pipe that merged search results from various online sites (amazon/ebay/cl). It was made by a former employee and was easily one of the most popular pipes. One day we found out he had his affiliate id in all of those links. We chuckled and moved on[1]

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9661133

nycpig• 4 years ago

Yahoo! Pipes was the 2002 future I envisioned. Come 2015, it was paired against reality.

From that point onwards, no longer was the OpenWeb the promise; but that of a walled garden.

While I mourn what might have been, I accept the reality of my new corpo future.

molotovh• 4 years ago

Rage, rage against the dying of the light!

mistrial9• 4 years ago

big No on complacent appeasement here

jsjohnst2• 4 years ago

I miss YQL much more than Yahoo! Pipes. My memory is hazy, but I think YQL is what ultimately killed Pipes actually, then YQL died because everything that didn’t generate revenue at Yahoo! died.

zackkatz• 4 years ago

Yahoo Pipes even supported running YQL as a node inside a pipe!

It was so good.

octagonal2• 4 years ago

You might enjoy https://pypi.org/project/htmlq/

est• 4 years ago

discovered n8n.io recently, seems a similar but more powerful product.

blacksmith_tb• 4 years ago

Not free, but with a similar UI.

naikrovek• 4 years ago

How well does Node-Red compare against this today? They seem comparable on the surface.

octagonal2• 4 years ago

Node-RED is much more focused on IoT as far as I can tell, although the UIs look comparable.

dpz• 4 years ago

Any mention of Yahoo Pipes always makes me think of Tom Scott's "This video has x views". Feels quite relevant to other comments people have been making here. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BxV14h0kFs0

thedougd• 4 years ago

During the app gold rush I would use Yahoo pipes to build 'backends' for apps that were nothing more than screen scrapers.

For example, you want to make an Android app that presents a home screen widget to show the current lottery jackpot or winning numbers. You could build a Yahoo Pipes thing to scrape and parse that, and format it into an RSS feed. The best part is anti-scraping measures allowed it because they thought it was a Yahoo crawler.

mwexler• 4 years ago

Loved Pipes. When I was at Yahoo!, folks kept showing such clever uses for it, all with minimal coding. It just worked. I miss it even today.

edmundsauto• 4 years ago

What were your favorite uses?

yegle• 4 years ago

There are a couple open source alternatives: Node-Red and Huginn.

I use Huginn to scrape the gas price and send it to my Telegram.

capableweb• 4 years ago

Besides Zapier and IFTTT, what modern alternatives are there for Yahoo Pipes? Ideally with similar UI of a graph rather than "If this, then do that" in a sequential list.

psadri• 4 years ago

Initial version of Pipes was linear. Mid development we realized it was too limiting and decided to introduce “wires” to allow graphs. It meant a much more complicated UI (thanks to JT for pulling it off - mind you this was back in the IE9 days, no standardized canvas, SVG etc).

avel• 4 years ago

  - node-RED
  - n8n.io

ca1232• 4 years ago

Take a look at https://docs.composable.ai

Glench• 4 years ago

Always have to upvote for Yahoo Pipes. Also don't miss this great love letter to Yahoo Pipes:

My Heart Feeds a Series of Tubes: https://medium.com/message/my-heart-feeds-a-series-of-tubes-...

yevpats• 4 years ago

Really interesting to see this and YQL because so much changed but at the end of the day a lot of problems can be abstracted/solved as data integration problems. Currently working on http://github.com/cloudquery/cloudquery

giancarlostoro• 4 years ago

I still feel like they missed out on the obvious move: charge money for Yahoo Pipes.

ZeroGravitas• 4 years ago

I started using the newsboat terminal RSS reader recently and it has some built in filters and ability to call out to scripts and it made me think of this.

https://newsboat.org/releases/2.10.1/docs/newsboat.html#_fil...

sporritt• 4 years ago

Yahoo Pipes was the direct inspiration for jsPlumb, name and all, back in 2009. We were surprised they hadn't open sourced the UI and decided that somebody should make something like that available. Big fan of Pipes.

Yahoo Pipes

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