I miss when Yahoo was really cool. Even long after it was made irrelevant, it had some of the best freely available public data APIs on the web.
I remember in college, one of our first programming projects was to create a "weather website" (this was before everything was an "app"). The project instructions suggested we use the Yahoo weather API, and it blew my mind that anyone could just make a http GET request and instantly get back some human-and-machine readable data, no scraping required.
Ha! Just mentioned this project to someone else in the thread. Just wanted to say thanks for making such a cool project that puts the power of controlled automation back in the hands of the individual.
It’s interesting how much this foreshadowed what’s happening with BI dashboard aggregators that Get built into Snowflake and Power BI. Sometimes I wonder why the RSS feed didn’t become more foundational internet tech
I'm sad I wasn't aware of this "app" when it was around. But everytime I hear about it, it is from people who "miss" it.
If this is the case, then why nobody came up with a clone to it?
An underlying assumption with Yahoo Pipes was that interesting places on the Internet would offer APIs which have a developer UX that matches or exceeds the quality of their official UI. A mixture of unprofitability and abuse lead to this no longer being the case. Tom Scott's essay here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BxV14h0kFs0
> If this is the case, then why nobody came up with a clone to it?
It was back in the Web 2.0 days when there were more open data sources and interchangeable data was a priority — RSS/Atom feeds and JSON APIs.
I think that a lot of the "no code" tools we're seeing today are direct descendants of Yahoo Pipes. In addition to the tools others have mentioned that are more directly inspired by Yahoo Pipes, there's also Zapier and other automation services that connect data from different sources.
n8n (Nodemation) is an excellent self-hosted source-available replacement for Yahoo Pipes with a similar drag-and-drop UI for workflows. You also have the option of using arbitrary JavaScript for data processing.
I remember in college, one of our first programming projects was to create a "weather website" (this was before everything was an "app"). The project instructions suggested we use the Yahoo weather API, and it blew my mind that anyone could just make a http GET request and instantly get back some human-and-machine readable data, no scraping required.