Yahoo Pipes | Hacker News Reader

Yahoo Pipes

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23 pointshunter-216 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.

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

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.

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

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?

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