Yahoo Pipes was one of those very clever things that not too many people were aware of, but those who did use it, probably quite liked. Essentially you could take feeds of various bits of data and do things with them, using a graphical layout to program your output.
In the distant past, I’ve used it. Although I’ll be honest and admit that I’ve not turned to it for quite a while. Years probably. However, Yahoo is closing it down. Once upon a time, people wondered about the processing power Yahoo was essentially giving you free of charge. I suspect today that it’s still chunky but nothing it couldn’t really handle. But given that Pipes’ own blog hadn’t been updated in 2.5 years, Yahoo has clearly lost interest.
That said, it still sits there producing some output for me until this day! Essentially I took this blog’s RSS feed and merged it with RSS feeds from some of my other output – Twitter, Flickr and YouTube – to create one giant “everything I do” feed.
But since I changed to WordPress a couple of years ago, I’ve not promoted the feed. And since Feedly says the feed has a single reader, I suspect that’s actually me, testing the feed works. In fact it doesn’t. Twitter has changed its API rules on many occasions, and the YouTube feed doesn’t seem to work. So anyone following that feed will currently see the output of this blog alongside any photos I publish. Of course, my better photos tend to get posted on this blog anyway. And if you love my photography, following me on Flickr is the way to go. Or just adding my Flickr RSS feed to your feed reader if that’s how you roll.
On top of this, although Pipes was of it’s time, I suspect that things like IFTTT have really been at the cutting edge of this kind of thing more recently. It’s not the same, but it has a wider set of tools to play with.
Feeds are seemingly always out of fashion despite the fact that I swear by them. My Feedly Pro susbsciption is essential.
Anyway, I thought I’d reference Pipes’ passing, and if you’re a person reading this in a feed reader who sees photos alongside these pieces in your feed, then you need to update!