https://twitter.com/revgeorge/status/604670598594232322
I just deleted a draft I wrote about Yahoo! Pipes closing because Reflections on the Closure of Yahoo Pipes says it all.
looking back, it seems to me now that the whole mashup thing arose from the idea of the web as a creative medium, and one which the core developers (the coders) were keen to make accessible to a wider community. Folk wanted to share, and folk wanted other folk to build on their services in interoperation with other services. It was an optimistic time for the tinkerers among us.
The web companies produced APIs that did useful things, used simple, standard representations (RSS, and then Atom, as simple protocols for communicating lists of content items, for example, then, later, JSON as a friendlier, more lightweight alternative to scary XML, which also reduced the need for casual web tinkerers to try to make sense of XMLHttpRequests), and seemed happy enough to support interoperability.
The death of Pipes doesn’t sting because it was a tool I need to get through my day. It’s just a sign that the times have changed and API openness isn’t valued like it was a decade ago. “End of an era” kind of sting.
A world that used Pipes as often as Excel is a world I want to live in. Where every company I do business with says “of course we have an API!” Imagine what Siri or Google Now or Amazon Echo look like in that world. That’s the world that Pipes represented, the world I’m mourning.