Yahoo! Pipes

History [edit]

Wires and boxes

Pipes opened in beta on 7 February 2007, built by Pasha Sadri, Ed Ho, Jonathan Trevor, Ido Green and Daniel Raffel. Its creators described it as a hosted service for remixing feeds and creating data mashups in a visual programming environment, and said the name paid tribute to Unix pipes, which let you chain small tools together on a command line.

The interface was a canvas. You dragged modules onto it, a feed fetcher, a filter, a sort, a translator, a regular expression, a location extractor, and connected their outputs to the next module's inputs with wires. The result was a working program that published as an RSS feed, JSON, or a web page, without writing a line of code and without hosting anything.

People used it for real work. Newsroom monitoring, job aggregation, translating and merging feeds, cleaning up badly formed RSS, geotagging, and thousands of small personal automations that would otherwise have needed a server and a cron job.

Ahead of the market it created

The idea has been repeatedly rebuilt since, and profitably. IFTTT launched in 2011, Zapier in 2012, and Node-RED, Microsoft Power Automate and n8n all descend from the same insight, that connecting services should be visible and should not require code.

Yahoo never charged for Pipes and never worked out how to.

Closed, and not exported

On 4 June 2015 Yahoo announced it was concentrating resources on search, communications and digital content. Pipes was on the list of casualties alongside Yahoo Maps. It went read-only on 30 August, and shut down on 30 September 2015.

There was no proper export. Users could see their pipes but not take them anywhere that would run them, and years of small, carefully built automations stopped when the servers did.