Show HN: Mashups – Resurrecting Yahoo Pipes, my side project
164 points by pyromaker 5 days ago | 44 comments
Hey everyone.

For those who remember, Yahoo Pipes was a tool to mashup RSS feeds back in the good ole' days. :)

I really loved that tool, but of course, it was shut down.

Since then I know there's been a few tools and attempts at bringing it back.

I always wanted to create Yahoo Pipes clone myself.

So here is my small side project - Mashups.io

https://www.mashups.io

It's an MVP at the moment and well, let's see where it goes.

Thanks all!

  • Xeoncross 4 days ago |
    I used Yahoo! Pipes to make a consolidated social feed some years ago (https://github.com/Xeoncross/MicroStream). It actually placed as an honorable mention in AListAparts 10k challenge.

    It was really fun to have a service that could handle all the backend requests for you before sites like Zapier existed.

  • arkensaw 4 days ago |
    I miss yahoo pipes! I used to use it to aggregate movie reviews for some project I was working on. Brings me back.
    • hiccuphippo 4 days ago |
      I remember using it to read webcomics directly in my rss reader. It got me to really learn regular expressions.
  • bewal416 4 days ago |
    Cool project! Yahoo Pipes was before my time, but I remember a Tom Scott video that mentioned it. Imagine having a service like that for free today…

    This video has … views by Tom Scott: https://youtu.be/BxV14h0kFs0?si=J3sVKEJhkABUSjN_

    • Nzen 4 days ago |
      Along the same lines, I recommend Retool's retrospective article [0] about pipes, for some of the perspective on how it looked from inside yahoo. I'll grant that, towards the end, it is an ad for their service.

      [0] https://retool.com/pipes

      • instagary 4 days ago |
        Thanks for sharing this, so cool!
  • xnx 4 days ago |
    Also check out https://nodered.org/ and https://github.com/huginn/huginn if you're interested in free and open-source software you can run yourself.
    • smarx007 4 days ago |
      Is there a consolidated comparison website for these? There is also n8n that is on the rise now.
      • CharlesW 4 days ago |
        Not to mention Zapier and Make, which appear to dominate the same "proprietary solutions" space where this tool resides.
        • nileshtrivedi 3 days ago |
          Also ActivePieces from YC
      • mutant 4 days ago |
        Windmill.dev too!

        Pipedream!

      • hcaz 4 days ago |
        Something like https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted?
        • smarx007 3 days ago |
          No, that's just a well-curated list. I am thinking along the lines of https://diskprices.com/ where you have all the characteristics/features mapped and can filter down using a faceted search (e.g. implemented using datasette) by what you need. For example, I know that if I need iOS Reminders integration, IFTTT has support for that but not n8n/make/zapier. And I think Make does not support Github integration with webhooks, only API calls. If you have a set of things in mind you'd like to integrate, picking the tool that supports a full combo OOB is a pain in the spreadsheet.
    • tonymet 4 days ago |
      how do these tools manage your credentials / tokens / cookies?
    • DonnyV 3 days ago |
      Is it just me but when I see a Rails app, I just walk away. I don't feel like setting that all up.
  • strawhatdev 4 days ago |
    For some reason, on mobile, the demo and pricing links in the navbar get me a 404. Works fine on desktop.
    • pyromaker 4 days ago |
      Apologies - that's been fixed. Though I haven't really optimized the demo for the mobile view I think.
  • mapt 4 days ago |
    I played with pipes for a minute to manage an RSS ecosystem, but didn't build anything that I kept around.

    The site seems to be down.

    Let's say we all build wonderful apps on this, and then you run out of money or legal liability for hosting.

    Is there a way to construct this so that we can export our Pipes to some standard format that the next person to pick up the torch could activate, and migrate to that?

  • raphar 4 days ago |
    Brings me back too. But what stayed stuck on my memory, was something i read here on HN: at some point, one yahoo dev added his affiliate code to the links !!
  • ChrisNorstrom 4 days ago |
    Is anyone able to scrape Bloomberg news? For years now they have no RSS and have made it very difficult to create one.
    • trekz 4 days ago |
      Open RSS does https://openrss.org/www.bloomberg.com

      Has feeds for deep-linked sections too https://openrss.org/www.bloomberg.com/technology

      • Onavo 4 days ago |
        You will need to go through archive.is if you want to bypass the paywall and get the full article, not just the summary.
    • bambax 4 days ago |
      Typing this in the console:

        $$("div[data-component='headline']")
      would select all titles in the home page. It shouldn't be super hard to build an RSS file using beautifulsoup for example. Can you be more specific about what you would need?
  • webspinner 4 days ago |
    Oh, this is really cool, and exactly what I'm looking for, but uh, I really wish I could test it! Thing is, I probably can't. I use a screen reader, so I doubt the interface would work for me, but maybe I'll try it, just for fun.
  • xrd 4 days ago |
    I had a lot of fun wiring and rewriting an RSS feed using this. Super simple and worked well. RIP Yahoo Pipes, but this looks like a worthy successor.

    And, I can't help but think there is gold to be found mining the graveyards of tech that people loved but was never a billion dollar revenue source...

  • chrisfosterelli 4 days ago |
    You can get a massive amount of money with the stock market plugin once you get the cryptocurrency and leverage upgrades.
    • pplonski86 4 days ago |
      Why do you think that stock and crypto plugins will be very profitable? There are no tools to combine finance data in easy way?
      • hx8 4 days ago |
        During my 20 minutes I noticed stocks and crypto seem to always fluctuate within a given range. So if you buy in the low end of the range you're guaranteed to see an opportunity to sell at the higher end of the range.

        Crypto is just stocks with a wider range and more volatility.

        • tacostakohashi 4 days ago |
          > seem to always fluctuate within a given range.

          ... except for sometimes, when they don't.

      • Kiro 4 days ago |
        Something is broken with HN because I'm also seeing this comment thread in the post about the Yahoo Pipes replacement: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42609819

        However, when I reply it says Stimulation Clicker at the top so no idea what's going on. @dang?

        • ablation 4 days ago |
          I'm seeing the same issue. In fact, the Pipes thread is where I'm posting this.
    • msm_ 4 days ago |
      After you get to the cryptocurrency it's basically game over, you can earn over a million during a few market cycles, and the speed you can do it it raises (almost) exponentially. Stocks are similar, but much slower.
  • instagary 4 days ago |
    The demo was intuitive, congrats on the launch! Can I ask what you used to build the canvas UI?
    • newusertoday 4 days ago |
      most likely xyflow
  • paulimsouza 4 days ago |
    can you add a JSON export option?
    • pyromaker 4 days ago |
      Good idea!
  • pentagrama 4 days ago |
    Great product, is awesome play with RSS feeds. Will check it out.

    Want to add for anyone wanting to quickly apply a filter to one RSS feed I recommend https://www.siftrss.com/, it doesn't require create an account and it works perfectly.

  • Uptrenda 4 days ago |
    I've heard many people here over the years mention it fondly. You must have left quite the impression on them.
  • sreejithr 4 days ago |
    Not gonna lie. I've been looking for something like this. It tried it, works really well. I'm gonna build a daily news pipeline for myself.
  • donatj 4 days ago |
    My biggest use for Yahoo Pipes was filtering podcast feeds - namely, filtering out episodes I don't care about. For instance, a podcast I listen to has episodes where they just talk shop and others where they play Dungeons & Dragons. I really cannot be bothered to care about the latter type.

    I actually wrote a little, easily modifiable Digital Ocean function I've been customizing and deploying per feed I want to filter. It feels like a hack, and it is, but it's "good enough". It's been working reasonably well and runs rarely enough that it falls into Digital Ocean’s free tier.

  • rcarmo 4 days ago |
    This is nice. Over the years I moved to Noda-RED for this kind of thing, but Pipes was just so much easier to use for quick queries and filtering.
  • onli 4 days ago |
    Hit me up if you want to compare notes about Pipes successor implementations ;) And best of luck.
  • samsquire 3 days ago |
    Thanks for putting the work into this.

    These kinds of software pipelines can be strangely satisfying to implement.

    The development style of thinking of stream processing and online algorithms

    It's also inspired by mapping and filtering and functional programming with flatmap.

    It reminds me of factorio

  • mtrovo 5 hours ago |
    Congrats on the launch! It's awesome to see someone resurrect the best parts of Yahoo Pipes, I really miss the simplicity of those days. Have you thought about supporting other sources, such as websites with tables or social media feeds?

    I've been thinking a lot about how LLM agents need some kind of glue to connect them to everyday websites at a level higher than raw HTML. What you’re building here really reminds me of that idea.