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.
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 ...
@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…
@MattHodges I was not involved in any of that—I saw some previews—and I was flabbergasted by the amazing depth and storytelling in the illustration and design.
@mapto@glennf Sorry, Firefox on Mac. But it’s more this style of article is a problem me. I need minimal distractions when reading and animated stuff causes problems. I usually hit the Reader view but a lot of the stylistic elements here are embedded in the text, not the CSS, which is not ideal.
Basically I would like words to be presented as words so I can read them without distraction or headaches.
@pete@mapto I'd be happy to pass along feedback—many sites, I have to switch to Reader or something similar. If Reader isn't giving you a clean experience, I want to tell my editor (screen captures of you see specifically are good!) so that they could tweak it? There's no advertising and no need to break a reading experience/capture eyeballs, you know!
@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!
@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.
@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.
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