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Comment by arepb | Hacker News Reader

In an alternate universe not too dissimilar from our own, Pipes is an independent startup and this announcement is Yahoo buying it for 8-9 figures

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There was IFTTT but looking at their page now it seems like maybe they have pivoted, at least I can't tell that it works like it used to: https://ifttt.com/

If you sign in all the previous functionality is still there. Seems their landing page is only advertising their new "Do" apps (which are a one-button extension of the old IFTTT recipes). Installed it, but never used them much.

Many see tools like http://Zapier.com or http://elastic.io (disclaimer - I'm a founder) as alternative to Pipes and IFFT.

But all of them seem to miss the focus on RSS, or even just the ability to manipulate feeds.

Zapier is the only reliable tool I found so far that can still import RSS to facebook pages, it tried it with pipes and it had issues with non-standard fields.

The whole internet misses the previous focus on RSS...

It's amazing how much a shift of management focus can change things... Google embraces RSS, develops the premiere online RSS reader, so good that even stand alone readers are largely abandoned... then google nukes RSS support from Chrome, and shutters Reader. And the world is worse off for it.

It definitely inspires a "never forget" kind of mindset, such that I don't trust relying on a SaaS that I don't have a personal exit strategy for.

Twitter took RSS as a concept and humanized it

RSS is an open format, Twitter is a walled garden.

If Twitter is making it more human, I'd rather be ruled by the robot army...

IFTTT works well for feeds, also had good success with Huginn in the past for feeds.

IFTTT still does the same things it always has.

I liked the concept and probably didn't give it a fair shake, but it flooded me with notifications and I just didn't want to take the time to tweak it to my needs. Its one of those apps you need a good tutorial (from someone other than the creators) to walk you through useful functionality and setup.

Wow, this is a jumble of I-don't-know-what:

https://ifttt.com/products/do/button

Their site aesthetic is trying to be Nest-y, but the UX does not communicate simplicity at all.

Too true.

The only thing Pipes would need is a .io domain and it could be dressed up as the Next Cool Thing which LargeCorp is desperate to get its hands on to prove it's still cool.

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