Yahoo Pipes

Yahoo! Pipes
Company type	Web application
Industry	Internet software
Founded	February 7, 2007; 19 years ago
Founder	Pasha Sadri, Ed Ho, Jonathan Trevor, Ido Green, Daniel Raffel
Defunct	September 30, 2015
Fate	Discontinued
Parent	Yahoo!

Adapted from the English Wikipedia article Yahoo Pipes, available under CC BY-SA 4.0Updated 9 August 2025

Yahoo! Pipes was a web application developed by Yahoo! that provided a visual interface for constructing data mashups by combining web feeds, web pages, and other online services. This tool allowed users to channel information from diverse origins and apply processing rules such as filtering. To assist users, the platform offered comprehensive documentation alongside community discussion pages for guidance and interaction.

History

Introduced in beta on 7 February 2007, Yahoo! Pipes was created by Pasha Sadri, Ed Ho, Jonathan Trevor, Ido Green, and Daniel Raffel. The platform enabled users to remix feeds and assemble data mashups through a visual programming interface inspired by the Unix pipes concept, which chains together utilities.

On 4 June 2015, Yahoo announced that Pipes would switch to a read-only state starting 30 August 2015 and would be fully discontinued on 30 September 2015. Rather than providing a paid tier, Yahoo chose to terminate the service entirely.

Purpose

The primary goal of Yahoo! Pipes was to generate new web pages by consolidating RSS feeds from various sources. It offered modules for retrieving and manipulating data, categorized into groups such as sources, user inputs, operators, URL, string, date, location, and number.

Creating and editing a Pipe

Users needed a Yahoo! ID to create or modify pipes. The entire pipe creation and editing process was conducted online without requiring any software installation. By selecting "Create a pipe," users accessed the Pipe Editor interface featuring three sections: the canvas, the library, and the debugger. Pipes were constructed by dragging modules from the library onto the canvas and linking them together. After saving and executing a pipe, users could assign it a name and description. Once published, pipes became accessible to all users who could then duplicate and tailor them.

The Canvas

Serving as the main workspace for pipe editing, the canvas allowed users to connect modules dragged from the Library to establish the pipe’s operational flow.

The Library

Situated on the left side of the editor, the Library housed modules organized by their function for deployment on the canvas.

Sources

Modules designed to retrieve data from one or multiple online sources.

User Inputs

Modules enabling user-provided inputs including date, location, number, text, or URL.

Operators

Modules responsible for filtering or transforming data within the pipe; examples include filter, count, location extractor, loop, regex, rename, reverse, sort, split, sub-element, tail, truncate, union, unique, and web service.

URL

Contained a module that built URLs by combining base URLs with query parameters to generate RSS feed links.

String

Modules intended for string manipulation or combination such as string builder, regex operations, replace, substring extraction, term extraction, and translation.

Date

Included tools like a date builder (which converts expressions like "yesterday" into actual dates) and a date formatter (which formats date outputs).

Location

Featured a location builder module that translates textual location descriptions into geographic data.

Number

Contained a basic math module capable of performing arithmetic operations on numerical inputs and outputs.

The Debugger

This section presents the output generated by the chosen module within the pipeline. Upon selecting any module on the workspace, the debugger reveals both its heading and detailed content, facilitating effective pipe construction and error resolution.

Mashups

A Web Mashup combines information from various online sources into a unified application. While Unix pipes merge data streams without offering comprehensive application capabilities, Yahoo! Pipes functioned primarily as a tool for data mashups rather than serving as a full-fledged mashup development environment.

References