Glenn Fleishman

Did you love Yahoo! Pipes and miss it? I sure did. I wrote this history of the graphical web-based processing tool that sure seemed like the future when it was introduced! https://retool.com/pipes I interviewed the core team and several other folks so we could finally have a definitive history. (And forget my words, even—the illustrations are amazing!)

This is part of a series at Retool, a visual programming tools company, that decided to make sure the past wasn’t forgotten.

Pipe Dreams: The life and times of Yahoo Pipes

In 2007, a small team at Yahoo! briefly changed how we program the internet. This is their story.

Dec 14, 2023 at 4:58pmWeb
Show threadPete Prodoehl 🍕Dec 14, 2023
@glennf I miss when Yahoo! did awesome things... They used to sponsor tech events I helped produced. There were some good people there!
Show threadmunterDec 14, 2023

@glennf

nicenicenice!¡

thx for the pointer @guenterhack

Show threadRichard ErikssonDec 14, 2023
@glennf This is catnip for Andy Baio.
Show threadGlenn FleishmanDec 14, 2023
@sillygwailo Andy was instrumental in introducing me to the core team!
Show threadRichard ErikssonDec 14, 2023
@glennf Well there you go. Yahoo! Pipes was definitely great. It’s possible to do the same stuff now, more or less, but it sure doesn’t feel the same. Thanks for the trip down Memory Lane (plus all of the background).
Show threadFlaming CheetoDec 14, 2023
@glennf I used this quite a bit.
In a way it reminded me of Excel because you could make something simple and cool, very fast.
But woe be anyone who showed it to their boss or client. "Oh great! Can you add this one calculation and give it to me every month aggregated with the other districts?"
Now you're F'd
Show threadKevin McCoyDec 14, 2023
@glennf This article really brought me a lot of joy, thank you. I loved Pipes back in the day and I'm delighted when making things in Node-RED now for many of the same reasons.
Show threadIndieterminacyDec 14, 2023
@glennf You may appreciate this history I made, which combined YahooPipes with Delicious for doing monitoring work:
https://bureaucracksy.constantvzw.org/delicious-user-guide/
Delicious User Guide — Bureaucracktic Bedtime Stories

This is a contribution to the publication Bureaucracktic Bedtime Stories that results from the worksession Bureaucracksy, organised by Constant, association for arts and media, between 7 and 12 December 2020. Bureaucracksy brought together art and artivist practices around the imaginative re-appropriations of rules and regulations and investigated the governance of techno-social systems through the prism of bureaucracy. The execution of rules is an essential element of computation, of digital infrastructures, and of the societies that they operate with. Critical practices of listing, naming, filtering, tool making, care and sharing require that some books are kept.

Show threadGlenn FleishmanDec 14, 2023
@indieterminacy That is great! I liked particularly: “It did not realise how awesome the Trinity of Delicious, Yahoo Pipes and Flickr were." I worked at a Kodak digital creative teaching center in Maine 1991–1993. Kodak had an array of amazing tools, 10 years ahead of the market, including the first commercially available digital camera. They squandered it. 10 years later they were somehow 10 years *behind*.
Show threadLiam BennettDec 14, 2023
I loved Pipes! What a blast from the past. The UI reminds me of @systeminit I wonder if that’s intentional?
Show threadAndy BaioDec 14, 2023
@glennf Aaahhh, this came out so great!
Show threadGlenn FleishmanDec 14, 2023
@andybaio THANK YOU! So much—for all the introductions, for sure. Great people to talk to. Was an incredible team of folks?
Show threadAndy BaioDec 14, 2023
@glennf Some of my favorite people at Yahoo, for sure.
Show threadDarius KazemiDec 14, 2023
@glennf I am so excited this exists, eagerly digging in
Show threadGlenn FleishmanDec 14, 2023
@darius Thank you! I was delighted to be asked to write and to write it. I hadn't seen any of the illustrations until today, too—just some sketches. I think the package is great!
Show threadMatthew BogartDec 14, 2023
@glennf oh wow.
Show threadDavid BeachDec 15, 2023
@glennf Very well done! I was right there as a PM for Brickhouse. You really captured the essence of the time.
Show threadGlenn FleishmanDec 15, 2023
@beach Thank you!
Show threadRandy LeaDec 15, 2023
@glennf Interesting article. I used Pipes and loved it. Yahoo had a ton of great services, but they seemed to quit trying.
Show threadjoeldnDec 15, 2023

@glennf nice scrolly, and a fitting tribute to the creative spirit from the days of mashup! back in 2011, and having previously seen pure data for music, i was thrilled by visual programming for the web and enjoyed making web scrapers (see pic - a pipe feeding planning records to a geocoder).

my funniest pipe was a twitter bot that filtered out swears and trash-talk by piping posts through an ever-expanding lexicon of lewdness. This revealed that twitter was already getting pretty dystopian!

Show threadNicolas HoizeyDec 15, 2023

@glennf amazing article! 😍

(and thanks for the mention… 😄)

Show threadGlenn FleishmanDec 15, 2023
@nhoizey thank you!
Show threadAlan LevineDec 15, 2023

@glennf This is amazing on so many levels, the history, the engaging media style as published.

I squint at people who bemoan death of Google Reader, I have that same functionality in any RSS Reader.

But I miss the loss of Pipes. It was an amazing feat and so useful for many projects.

There was a new version created maybe in 2017, I never did much https://www.pipes.digital/

Pipes

Get and manipulate data with a visual programming interface.

Show threadGlenn FleishmanDec 15, 2023
@cogdog Thank you so much! Yes, I feel like Pipes had a unique role at the time. The next tool I liked so much was Nuzzle, which would scavenge my social media to find news stories people i followed were posting. I think even ChatGPT has some Pipes in it (when it works well) as you can describe what you need and it executes it. If an AI tool got better at data flows (take these sources, output in this format), and you can set it on a schedule…
Show threadJ Herskowitz 👋Dec 15, 2023
@glennf Still one of my favorite products of all time. I had something like 200 different music-related hacks running on it by they time it shut down. RIP.
Show threadvarx/socialDec 15, 2023
@glennf Oh man, Pipes... it was such a mixture of fun, empowering, and grueling.
Show threadTim ChambersDec 16, 2023
@glennf @KevinMarks Pipes was great….
Show threadDJ AdamsDec 20, 2023

@glennf Yep, I loved it and miss it? (Ditto for Tarpipe - see https://qmacro.org/blog/posts/2009/04/21/tarpipe.com-programming-2.0/)

Wonderful article, nice work!

BTW, did you really mean "RSS 2.0" when you mentioned RDF? It's ironically very much one of the versions of RSS that does not have RDF, and those that remember will recall the schism, the pain, and know why ...

tarpipe.com - Programming 2.0?

tarpipe.com - Programming 2.0? 21 Apr 2009 | 2 min read Is tarpipe.com an early example of a “Programming 2.0″ concept? I first read about...

DJ Adams
Show threadGlenn FleishmanDec 20, 2023
@qmacro Gosh, yes, should have been something like RDF (part of an ill-fated RSS 1.0)!
Show threadDJ AdamsDec 20, 2023
@glennf ha! Not ill fated, for me RSS 1.0 is the one true RSS :)
Show threadDJ AdamsDec 20, 2023
@glennf before a certain someone threw their toys out of the pram and upset an entire community.
Show threadDJ AdamsDec 20, 2023
@glennf but the wonderful outcome of that horrible episode was Atom, which led to the Atom Publishing Protocol and ultimately, via Microsoft, to OData.
Show threadGlenn FleishmanDec 20, 2023
@qmacro There are still followers of the Shabbetai Zvi! Look him up!
Show threadAndy BriceDec 21, 2023
@glennf It was an interesting article. I found it on HN. I have my own (non-web) nodes and arrows data processing tool, https://www.easydatatransform.com . I'm not sure how similar it is to Yahoo Pipes as I only briefly played with it a long time ago.
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