[mikepk]

Wow memories. My first startup, grazr.com created a feed processing system that could achieve similar (imho superior) results to pipes and worked in a different way (https://mikepk.com/2007/03/grazrscript-v12-beta/). The idea was to use actual code (rather than graphical drag-drop) to write feed processing and transformation applications.

We used server side javascript (before Node, I like to think we were ahead of our time, our own fork of Spidermonkey with network and other server code!). We used OPML as a container format with <grazr:script> tags in them analogous to html <script> tags. The "pipes" in our system were much more like unix pipes, where the output of one script could be the input to another. In the running script you could access the feed with a customized "Feed Dom" with items and do manipulations.

With grazr's real-time freshness, feed normalization and database it worked amazingly well. We never were able to get people to understand it (it was super nerdy). I built some pretty amazing apps with it, unfortunately none of it exists anymore :).

Yahoo pipes seemed like the sign of the end for Grazr though. Since we had a widget and feed display tech. a _lot_ of people wired their pipes to grazr's widgets for display and publishing. We saw an initial "burst" on pipes announce and then saw the yahoo pipes usage drop pretty fast and never really recover. As a proxy, it looked like there wasn't enough "there" there to continue to pursue our programming environment.

I still miss it though, it was fun to work on.