Well, another useful piece of the internet is pulling the curtains as its show is complete.  Yahoo Pipes was an interesting "Web 2.0" service that came out when we were all hot and heavy on RSS-goodness, and had open ways to get content from one site, remix it with another, and create our own new thing. At the time of its announcement I was listening to a Greek Podcast by vrypan, and other Greek Geeks, who introduced me to this service.

What made Yahoo Pipes really great was the quick and easy way that a user could splice together feeds from a variety of sites, blogs, and anything that really gave you an RSS feed.  I was able to pull together feeds from my blogs, from my twitter, from the-now-defunct Google Reader and create a new feed that I could use with a widget on my sites as a consolidated activity flow.    I actually used Pipes a lot during the early days when I was setting up various community sites.  One of the sites that I still maintain, UMassID.com - a current student and alumni site for a program I am an alumnus of, has a job-board. Of course one of the big issues with job boards is the inertia and overcoming it - people need to post jobs.  Well.  Yahoo Pipes, along with Monster, HotJobs, HigherEdJobs, and a few other places allowed me to create an RSS feed for any job postings that contained the terms "instructional designer". This way, instead of seeking out job postings on 10 sites, all you needed was one feed.

Just drag and drop...

It seems, however, that the days of Openness (unfettered openness anyway) on the web are now gone and we've gone back to walled gardens - because that's a service's competitive advantage.  Bull.  There are benefits to open, but whatever.

Yahoo Pipes was a great resource.  Even though I didn't use it as often these days for new feed creation, I do have a variety of old feeds that will stop working soon.  I guess it's time to go into my various sites and do site maintenance.

Adieu Yahoo Pipes, it was great knowing you