Yahoo has announced it will shut down its web mashup application Pipes on September of this year. Pipes was a pretty useful application to combine web feeds from multiple sources. With an easy to use GUI, you could add filters, modify the fields present in a feed and render the Pipe in RSS, JSON or Atom formats. So you could subscribe to a Pipe just like you would subscribe to any web feed.
During the last Ashes series in 2013, I had created a score-on-demand service by combining Pipes with Skype API. A user could register to my Ashes Score Updater by simply sending me a Skype message. Then the application would periodically read the feed provided by Pipe and send match score to all the registered users via chat messages.
Sadly only one person ever registered to my service. It’s a testament to the waning interest in Test cricket in face of instant gratification provided by T20, which is consistent with today’s low attention spans, that might possibly indicate a gradual cultural decadence.
No, not really :P. If anything, it just meant that people are less interested in matches their teams aren’t involved in.
But I did have a lot of fun playing around. 🙂