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Comment by psadri | Hacker News Reader

Thanks for posting and the nice comments. Glad to have built something that people found useful...

It feels like Zapier and IFTTT are the successors to Pipes, but I never quite got the same feeling from them (maybe I haven't checked Zapier in a while). But Pipes was ahead of its time and I'm still not sure of anything that really comes close to what I could do with pipes even back then. Thank you.

Integromat [0] somewhat approximates Pipes. Haven't heard as much about it as IFTTT and Zapier. I found it because they've got one of the few remaining active API integrations with RunKeeper, which since closed the door to new application registrations.

[0] https://www.integromat.com/

Node-RED seems to be the best alternative which is successful and good enough these days. It's selfhosted, and it seems combining it with home assistent seems also very popular to get the best of it.

Sorry, one last note. I was a broke college student at the time. I made tens of thousands of dollars with Pipes doing ethical arbitrage. I still miss it, where's our Kickstarter?

arbitrage of what? Sounds interesting

Sure, I can share. I live abroad now and don't have time to do it anymore. Back in 2008-9? there were 7 major estate sale websites. Nowadays everything has consolidated to estatesales.net. 4 of the 7 had RSS feeds. I drank in all 4 RSS feeds, filtered out sales without pictures, and filtered towards certain keywords. My game was second hand art buying, but only in a 100 mile radius. As I got better at it, my radius started expanding. Note, it wasn't make $300 every sale, it was very hit or miss. But load the car up with some Ed Ruscha originals and Frankenthaler prints and make a killing consigning to auction houses for a morning's work. The old man pickers always wondered how I always got the jump on them. Thanks for paying off my college debt early Yahoo Pipes. Please come back!

Was Caterina Fake involved in any way with Yahoo Pipes? I believe she headed Yahoo Brickhouse at the time, but the timelines are foggy for me. Pipes is so unlike any Yahoo product.

If I recall correctly Pipes was originally a 100%-Sunnyvale product, predating Brickhouse.

Pipes preceded Brickhouse and Caterina Fake's involvement. Brickhouse was the first step in encrusting the Pipes project in enough layers of management to ensure it would die.

Congratulations on having created something that many people seem to have a fond opinion of. That must feel good.

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