Yahoo! Pipes was, at the time, one of the first high-end examples of how powerful a JavaScript interface could be. It eventually slipped into disuse -- mostly the fault of Yahoo's marketing team -- but it remains to be a useful and free tool for anyone looking to automate things and actions on the web. It mostly revolves around feed manipulation, whereby a user is able to modify, combine and change webpages, JSON and RSS feeds and create a completely customized feed based on what the user needs.
Unfortunately (but not unexpectedly) the service will be shut down starting August 30th with users not being able to create new Pipes. This will continue until September 30th where the service will completely shut down and the infrastructure disbanded or repurposed for another project. The blog post mentions that the Pipe definition can be downloaded and gives instructions on how it can be done.
There are some options for the more tech-savvy, however. pipes2js claims to convert a Pipe into a node.js module. There is also pypes which does the same thing as pipes2js but converts it to Python rather than node.js.
While some of the individual Yahoo! Pipes components have already been documented and open sourced, many people (including the author) are hoping that the project will be completely open sourced so that it can be forked and deployed -- it really was a great web app that was ahead of its time.
Source: Yahoo! Pipes blog
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