Glenn Fleishman
What do you remember about Yahoo! Pipes? Did you use it? Do you miss it? (Working on a historical article.)
Apr 13, 2023 at 6:13pmWeb
Show threadGabriel NApr 13, 2023

@glennf many, many times. An amazing tool for prototyping and even building small products.

Very few tools that promise to “program with a graphic interfase” get even close to Yahoo Pipes.

Astounding.

Show threadGlenn FleishmanApr 13, 2023
@wtrmt I miss it every day
Show threadMatt HornsbyApr 13, 2023

@glennf in days before dropbox and ubiquitous smart phone, I used it to turn emails to myself into an RSS feed, so I could easily pass myself notes from work.

I think I also cobbled an RSS to html pipe to aggregate my tumbls, pownces, etc for embedding, mostly just because I could.

Show threadDr. Juande Santander-VelaApr 13, 2023
@glennf I did some early experimentation with Yahoo! Pipes, but never used it for anything in production. At the time many block interconnection interfaces were on vogue, such as Apple’s Quartz Composer, and Yahoo! Pipes rhymed on that topic. Having a graphical way of having access to open REST APIs and join it into actions felt great… and useful!
Show threadDr. Juande Santander-VelaApr 13, 2023
@glennf In some sense, Yahoo! Pipes showed that open APIs could be used by anyone, from a small person trying to achieve something concrete just once… or a large behemoth like Yahoo! And that probably started making many CEOs and CFOs thinking of value that could be unleashed that they could not tap into… and start shutting those APIs down.
Show threadDr. Juande Santander-VelaApr 14, 2023

@glennf just found this video [1] from a link from the v2 release of Yahoo! Pipes in the Wayback Machine [2]…

[1]: https://yewtu.be/watch?v=J3tS_DkmbVA
[2]: https://web.archive.org/web/20120214093835/http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/

Show threadDr. Juande Santander-VelaApr 14, 2023
@glennf and apart from the demise of Yahoo! Pipes, that video also shows how Flickr was the epitome of open APIs… funny thing, it still is… but relevance has dwindled.
Show threadUli Kusterer (Not a kitteh)Apr 13, 2023
@glennf I don't remember what I used it for, but yes, I did, and loved it. 😅 Probably hooking up RSS feeds to Twitter or something? The kind of things I likely use IFTTT for now? IDK 🤣
Show threadGlenn FleishmanApr 13, 2023
@uliwitness Yes, it was basically a web-database engine—RSS was one thing, but you could do a lot of free manipulation, like “parse this thing and find stuff like it on a map and then show me the results as a feed." ("Find me apartments on Cragislist that cost below $X within a mile of a park.”) IFTTT has some stuff in common, but Pipes was open ended.
Show threadUli Kusterer (Not a kitteh)Apr 13, 2023
@glennf Oh it might have been what I used to have certain web searches in NetNewsWire then. Searched for tech stuff, TV shows and actors I liked, to be on top of what they were doing. Still haven't found a replacement for that. I think at one point there was also Google or Yahoo Alerts or something, which was more limited?
Show threadEric EggertApr 13, 2023
@glennf I did. It was very fickle but did get the job done back in the Web 2.0 days. Make.com is the spiritual successor to me.
Show threadNick CharltonApr 13, 2023
@glennf I used it for a couple of things, but the one I mostly remember is using it to trim out or combine RSS feeds. Lovely tool for quickly stitching stuff together
Show threadSam (Satyajit) GroverApr 13, 2023
@glennf I used it for a bit. Probably not as a super user. It was great though. Blew my mind IIRC.
Show threadPhil Feldman, PhDApr 13, 2023
@glennf I really liked the YUI API. I thought that it was one of the few OOP approaches to JavaScript that really worked. It's still running on my personal site (philfeldman.com)
Show threadGlenn FleishmanApr 13, 2023
@philfeld Oh, I remember that—they released libraries you could incorporate locally, right?
Show threadPhil Feldman, PhDApr 13, 2023
@glennf Yup, I'm pretty sure that's why everything still works! High threshold to learn, but once you got the hang of it, there was nothing like it. Still isn't tbh
Show threadLou PanicciaApr 13, 2023
@glennf I learned about Yahoo! Pipes at a SXSW talk I wondered into back in 2009. Used it to prototype a feature at the music startup I was working at that would show a band’s MySpace friend count since they didn’t have an API.
Show thread(christiancable) has movedApr 13, 2023
@glennf I used it to give me a single rss feed for all the podcasts I wanted to listen to at the time. A very basic subscription management tool.
Show threadJonathan PoritskyApr 13, 2023
@glennf Used it. Miss it. It was how I managed social posts to my site once upon a time: https://www.candlerblog.com/2012/08/31/static-link-posts-to-tweets/
Syndicating Link Posts From a Static Blog to Twitter Without...Well, Let Me Explain

A few weeks ago I started syndicating all of the posts from the candler blog to a new Twitter account, @thecandlerblog. Since I’m off Wordpress and thus can’t use a fancy-pants plugin to achieve this, I decided to use an If This Then That (IFTTT) recipe to take my site’s RSS feed and send out a tweet on the new account. Easy! Not so fast. I ran into a bit of a problem that I figured was edge case-y enough that I didn’t need to bother you all with the nerdy details of how I fixed it.

Show threadJonathan PoritskyApr 13, 2023
@glennf Also used it to generate author feeds from sites like The New Yorker that were stingy with RSS.
Show threadGlenn FleishmanApr 13, 2023
@poritsky Honestly a reason I like Authory so much as a writer: it’s a human-run Pipes. You can feed it RSS feeds and other stuff, and they have to examine things or write new filters to parse just for your articles, podcasts, etc.
Show threadErika EnsignApr 13, 2023
@glennf yahoo-what, now?
Show threadGlenn FleishmanApr 13, 2023
@HollyGoDarkly An 🙌amazing thing 🙌. It was like the Internet’s public utility for taking stuff on a bunch of sites, filtering it, and making a feed you could subscribe to. You could run queries on maps, extract articles, tons of stuff. It was like eating candy that never made you sick from too much of it.
Show threadAdam BrownApr 13, 2023
@glennf yahoo pipes was amazing, powerful and simple to use, would love to see it again
Show threadDan MisenerApr 13, 2023
@glennf I loved Pipes. Used it to split one network-wide SoundCloud podcast feed into multiple show-specific feeds based on the presence of hashtags in the description field. RIP.
Show threadGlenn FleishmanApr 13, 2023
@misener Brilliant
Show threadbobrkApr 13, 2023
@glennf Never heard of it, until folks started talking about it's demise.
Show threadJ.P. StewartApr 13, 2023

@glennf It _remains_ the only tool I have seen to realize the goal / dream of a url + parsing + logic == magic.

I had over a dozen pipes driving regular feeds and sites I would visit.

I miss it greatly.

Combined with start.com, it was an amazing customization engine.

Show threadPatApr 13, 2023
@glennf I wanted to build a system to display FriendFeed (rip) comments on a blog, but had no budget to run a server and minimal programming experience.
Yahoo Pipes solved both problems by fetching comments from FriendFeed’s server and massaging them into the shape that the frontend needed.
Show threadPatApr 13, 2023
@glennf Even today, there are a lot of problems that I have solved in my day-jobs that could be better served by Yahoo Pipes.
Show threadGlenn FleishmanApr 13, 2023
@pat RIGHT! RIGHT! I think about Pipes all the time.
Show threadAlex RemingtonApr 13, 2023
@glennf That was the game where you had to rotate and place the segments to control the flow of Flooz, right?
Show threadGlenn FleishmanApr 13, 2023
@alexremington I think BeanZ, not Flooz, to earn Klout?
Show threadAlex RemingtonApr 13, 2023
@glennf A great thing to realize about oneself as one gets older is that there is no need for AI hallucinations to completely lose one's grip on reality, memory, and [waves hands vaguely] kinda everything
Show threadwladimirApr 13, 2023
@glennf yes and yes
Show threadKathy E. Gill 🇺🇦Apr 15, 2023

@glennf

I remember it happened. 😂
I remember playing with it but not what I created but I’m guesstimated it was RSS related.

I immediately became enamored with IFTTT. However, I don’t really use it anymore.

Show threadmatt sephtonDec 15, 2023
@glennf enjoyed the article! These days I use Huginn, though I miss the visual layout of Pipes