Yahoo pipes. It was so great at creating rss feeds and custom workflows. There are replacements now like Zapier and n8n but loved that. Also google reader which is mentioned multiple times already.
Yahoo Pipes was what internet should have been. We're so many decades into computing and that kind of inter-tool linking has only barely been matched by unix pipes.
Many companies are working very hard to make that impossible unfortunately. For example you can't get posts from public Facebook groups automatically, although that would be a really good source candidate. They used to allow it, but... not anymore.
I loved pipes. I had rss feeds from all the sites where I was sharing content collected up and formatted via pipes into a single rss feed that was pulled into a php blog.
Then all those sites I used to post on stopped supporting rss one by one and finally pipes was killed off.
For a while I used a python library called riko that did the same thing as pipes without the visual editor. I have to thank it for getting me off php and into python.
If anyone with time, money and resources wants to revive the ideas of Yahoo! Pipes then I would suggest using Node-RED[^1] as a good starting point.
It has the advantage of being open source, has well defined and stable APIs and a solid backend. Plus 10+ years of constant development with many learnings around how to implement flow based programming visually.
I used the Node-RED frontend to create Browser-Red[^2] which is a Node-RED that solely executes in the browser, no server required. It does not support all Node-RED functionality but gives a good feel for using Node-RED and flow based programming.
The second project with which I am using Node-RED frontend is Erlang-Red[^3] which is Node-RED with an Erlang backend. Erlang is better suited to flow based programming than NodeJS, hence this attempt to demonstrate that!
Node-RED makes slightly different assumptions than Yahoo! Pipes - input ports being the biggest: all nodes in Node-RED have either zero or one input wires, nodes in Yahoo! Pipes had multiple input wires.
A good knowledge of jQuery is required but that makes it simpler to get into the frontend code - would be my argument ;) I am happy to answer questions related to Node-RED, email in bio.
I missed Yahoo Pipes a lot so I built something similar recently for myself :) I know there are a few alternatives out there, but had to scratch my own itch.
I can recommend Apache Camel (https://camel.apache.org) for similar data integration pipelines and even agentic workflows. There are even visual editors for Camel today, which IMHO make it extremely user friendly to build any kind of pipeline quickly.
Ah, this would get my vote too. I've seen a few attempts since, but I think you needed that era of "throw lots of money at any idea" to get it off the ground again.
Is there a way to browse a pinterest style view of all setups and click on the images to see more details? This is my first interaction and I’d love to scan through a lot at once to get ideas and drill down where it makes sense.
