Yahoo Pipes

Yahoo Pipes(en.wikipedia.org)

23 points by hunter-2 4 years ago | 16 comments

I miss when Yahoo was really cool. Even long after it was made irrelevant, it had some of the best freely available public data APIs on the web.

I remember in college, one of our first programming projects was to create a "weather website" (this was before everything was an "app"). The project instructions suggested we use the Yahoo weather API, and it blew my mind that anyone could just make a http GET request and instantly get back some human-and-machine readable data, no scraping required.

tectonic 4 years ago |

Yahoo! Pipes inspired me to make Huginn. https://GitHub.com/huginn/huginn

Jermaine_Jabi 4 years ago | |

Thanks for making it! Huginn is my go to for buying used stuff on kijiji. I've saved so much effort and $ thanks to this project

dwrodri 4 years ago | |

Ha! Just mentioned this project to someone else in the thread. Just wanted to say thanks for making such a cool project that puts the power of controlled automation back in the hands of the individual.

lordofmoria 4 years ago |

It’s interesting how much this foreshadowed what’s happening with BI dashboard aggregators that Get built into Snowflake and Power BI. Sometimes I wonder why the RSS feed didn’t become more foundational internet tech

todsacerdoti 4 years ago |

If you loved Yahoo! Pipes, you should try https://pipedream.com

meenan 4 years ago |

I use Azure Logic Apps to replace a simple API mashup I would have previously used Pipes for. No complaints

ahmedfromtunis 4 years ago |

I'm sad I wasn't aware of this "app" when it was around. But everytime I hear about it, it is from people who "miss" it. If this is the case, then why nobody came up with a clone to it?

dwrodri 4 years ago | |

Check out IFTTT (https://ifttt.com) or Huginn (https://github.com/huginn/huginn). They're similar but not quite.

An underlying assumption with Yahoo Pipes was that interesting places on the Internet would offer APIs which have a developer UX that matches or exceeds the quality of their official UI. A mixture of unprofitability and abuse lead to this no longer being the case. Tom Scott's essay here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BxV14h0kFs0

easrng 4 years ago | | |