pipes creator here: sad to see pipes shutdown. i am surprised it lasted this long -- it was abandoned years ago. on the positive side, it is nice to see it mentioned in the same sentence as y! maps which used to be a big deal back in the day.
That faith is dead now, of course, scoured from the earth by walled gardens and VC money. But like Catholics in Elizabethan England, some of us quietly tend our secret shrines and pray for its return.
(Hopefully that will work out better for us than it did for them.)
> Bosworth advocated an open model for data.(...) Imagine if you can query any data that is available anywhere in the world. Bosworth said that what this requires is a single, simple, open wire format for items. The format needs to be simple for any P programmer to deliver and any JavaScript programmer to consume. He also pointed out that "complex things tend to break and simple things tend to work." Google has the simplest query language in the world. There is no structure and no syntax. (my note: at that time Bosworth was VP of Product Management at Google)
That is all dead now.
However, why such pessimism? I hardly think that standard formats and open APIs are dead. Sure, there are some nasty blights upon cyberspace in this regard (ahem, Facebook, Apple), but other players are still keeping the dream alive to some extent (e.g. Google, Yahoo).
But it is possible that it's confirmation bias + uncommon sample on my part.
What do you mean? Channels have an element linking to an RSS feed. In fact, just pasting a channel URL to an RSS reader should work.
Example of a channel feed: https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UCr4soU_...
Maybe start a new, open source version of Pipes?
Maybe im dreaming about a free version of Percolate, which I have heard is really cool.
Pipes would often get blocked by 3rd party data providers, which motivated me to roll my own library.
No graphical interface. Personally, I found Y! Pipes UI hard to work with when I needed to build large pipelines.
RssPercolator is a .NET library used for downloading, aggregating, and filtering RSS feeds. Developed out of frustration with Yahoo Pipes.
- RSS and Atom feed formats - Asynchronous multi-feed download - Multiple sources and multiple destinations - Feed filters (string match, wildcards, and Regex)
We (Webflow) are actually considering building a Pipes alternative in the near future, and I'd love to sit down with you and brainstorm some ideas. If you'd be willing to make some time to see a very rough demo, I'd love to get in touch - my email is in my profile.
For another, Yahoo legal prevented us from doing any kind of long-term storage of RSS feeds. That made the service far less useful than it could have been.
Finally, they didn't give it any resources at all. Management was too preoccupied with the failed Brickhouse project (internal startup incubator) and the host of failed ideas that it spawned.
What was Pipes for?
Wait, is there something legally wrong about storing RSS feed data?
I wonder if it would be possible to build something similar using IPV6/some kind of P2P/STUN/TURN/UDP hole punching/swarm/ethereum / any way to make a distributed system that does the same thing. Or maybe just volunteer running Node on their own VPSs.
Seriously, I think the only Yahoo products I use are Pipes, Groups and Flickr. And Flickr doesn't really count.