A lot of people swore by Yahoo! Pipes.
The site was a side-project that was never part of Yahoo’s core business, but had die-hard fans nonetheless. The service allowed people to combine data from sources, easily applying filters and manipulations through a visual programming language, almost like Scratch.
When Yahoo discontinued the service in 2015, it left its loyal users scrambling for alternatives. Most fled to IFTTT and Zapier.
One new service that wants to pick up the mantle dropped by Yahoo! Pipes is pipes.digital — an early-stage product that already shows promise. Although it’s nowhere near as feature-rich as IFTTT or Zapier, it is certainly an intriguing effort, and captures the essence of Yahoo! Pipes.
Pipes.digital lets you import data sources from RSS feeds, and then apply actions to the data by dragging-and-dropping. So, if you wanted to, you could combine data sources into one feed, or apply filters.
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For quick-and-dirty tasks, it does a good job. The visual editor is intuitive and slick, and I found it easy to combine blocks and create logic flows. Although, admittedly, I only created small scripts. I have no idea how it would fare when faced with something large and complex.
Obviously, there’s still a long way to go. I’m not just talking about in terms of features either.
When I road-tested it, the service had just gone viral on Hacker News. Perhaps as a result of the new-found traffic, or perhaps as a sign of its alpha-esque status, the site kept on throwing error messages.
But persevere, and you’ll find a service that’s intriguing, and hopefully will continue to mature. You can check it out here, and read more about the development process on the founder’s Show HN.
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