I agree. When I first heard of it, IFTTT was basically Pipes done right for me.
In many ways Pipes was far too ahead of its time. The Web simply did not have as much computation and reason for integrating data between different web apps at the time.
Apart from those, I’d suggest to take a look to Integromat. Their “http module” (a UI for a curl-like service) is really handy when you want to interact with a 3rd party service that hasn’t been integrated yet.
In many ways Pipes was far too ahead of its time. The Web simply did not have as much computation and reason for integrating data between different web apps at the time.