Yahoo Pipes

  • 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.

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

  • 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

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

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

  • 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?

  • My favorite piece which captures some of the wonder of Yahoo Pipes was this essay called My Heart Feeds a Series of Tubes:

    https://medium.com/message/my-heart-feeds-a-series-of-tubes-...

  • Was expecting to read about a stunt by the Yahoo beverage company to pump chocolate soda through pipes

    Edit: My memory has failed me, that would have been "Yoo-hoo"

  • n8n (Nodemation) is an excellent self-hosted source-available replacement for Yahoo Pipes with a similar drag-and-drop UI for workflows. You also have the option of using arbitrary JavaScript for data processing.

    https://github.com/n8n-io/n8n

  • I genuinely miss this site. I had so much fun playing with this as a kid. It’d be cool if they open sourced it!