Sadri built Pipes as a cloud-hosted service alongside just four other core team members. Users dragged and dropped elements in a web browser to roll their own information feeds, taking published items from websites in many formats—news, database outputs, and blog posts among them. Pipes’ users could then merge the results, filter and process them, and produce a regularly updated stream that could be subscribed to in a desktop app—or texted to a phone. Geotagged results could even pass through a Yahoo Maps filter to restrict results based on location and proximity to features like parks or city neighborhoods.

Every Pipes’ mapping was public; every Pipe could be copied and modified. “That was design principle one for us, and I think that had a lot to do with making it accessible to non-developers,” Sadri said. This openness that encouraged—really, required—knowledge-sharing embodied some of the internet’s best qualities that were on the verge of being lost at that time.

After roughly six months of development from mid-2006 to early 2007, Pipes was slated to be quietly released into public beta in February 2007. But instead of the expected thousand or so initial users at launch, Pipes had hundreds of thousands—not to mention the many others who failed to get through. Unoptimized code on a handful of servers struggled to execute the newsfeed workflows and serve up pages; the system was completely overloaded.

Pipes would more fully develop many ideas cribbed from Automator. However, it wouldn’t be a native app—it would live in the browser. Also unlike Automator, which let programmers expand on its prefab actions by writing scripts or code in most any language available on a Mac, Pipes would be limited to a constrained—albeit still powerful—set of options.

As a cloud-hosted system in that era, had Pipes allowed arbitrary code to run, it would have been disastrous, chewing up CPU cycles and crowding out resources. (Later cloud-based engines and hosting created sandboxes, computational throttles and price tags, and virtual machines to limit impacts.)

Sadri recruited Jonathan Trevor and Ed Ho from within Yahoo to join the team as its only programmers. Ho noted that before Pipes, he and Trevor had worked on another highly interactive project that let a user drag a Yahoo Maps view around and see all the events happening in the area.

Although he and Trevor were used to developing their own ideas with Yahoo, Ho said “Pasha was kind of well known at Yahoo for being this super creative guy [...] He was given kind of carte blanche to make something cool.” That sold them both.

But unlike a newsreader, which aggregated the results into a list or groups, Pipes’ power came from the ability to connect and filter the output of all the feeds through intermediate steps. Compared to an aggregator, Pipes allowed for more advanced processing and customization of collected data. It struck a balance between being versatile enough for experimentation and specific enough that most workflows focused on filtering news, blog posts, and listings at online auctions, Craigslist, and ecommerce sites.

The Pipes team’s canonical example was the scenario of a renter seeking an apartment within a given distance from a park. (The Pipe workflow took a feed of Craigslist rentals, processed the addresses against Yahoo Maps’ query language to look for parks, and then produced a list that fit within a given radius from any park.)  Via Mastodon, former user Nicolas Hoizey pointed me to a Pipe he used from 2007 until the service’s end in 2015 that let him add a bookmark to the Pinboard bookmarking service and process it into the form he wanted before handing off to IFTTT and Buffer to post to Twitter.

Pipes output could be embedded into a page or formatted as HTML, JSON, KML, RSS, or XML. There was even a way for a non-Yahoo website to include JavaScript that queried a Pipe workflow and received the results back without any front-end browser or back-end server involvement. Pipes, in effect, could power other sites.

It was only in 2005 that Google Maps launched, which became a shining example of allowing people to use drag and zoom within an interface, interacting with a map that updated live instead of with page reloads. Improvements in browser technology let CSS and JavaScript interact more fluently and efficiently with users, while also allowing JavaScript to have continuous live interactions with remote servers (a technology initially labeled AJAX).

Building a structure of nodes and wires within Pipes, and representing them within a visual coding environment, occupied more time and effort than any other part of the project before launch, according to team members’ recollections. It required a fair amount of custom HTML, CSS, and JavaScript to allow Pipes to work in that era. Sadri said getting their boxes and animated, curvy lines “to actually work across all the browsers that we supported was one of our major technical achievements.”

Fortunately, the team was up to the task. Raffel said Trevor’s rapid development skills and his ability to quickly address the team’s needs with innovative solutions, especially, played a crucial role.

“Just to give you a sense of how amazing Jonathan was at programming: I would mock stuff up, and before I could complete writing everything out, he’d have a prototype working,” Raffel said. “I’d start using it, and I’d be like, ‘Well, that’s neat, but we need a way to know which primitives can accept an input.’ He’d, minutes later, have something working that was a visual cue that would show you, ‘This highlights this thing.’”

Spreadsheets effectively popularized the concept of reactive programming with the wider world—an early demonstration of the power of automatic updates based on input changes. Sadri shared that the team looked to them as a gold standard for coding for non-programmers. “[They’re] actually one of the most popular programming environments in the world,” he said, describing them as “the only programming model where you can actually see the data.” Indeed, if something goes wrong, a spreadsheet provides immediate feedback—no compilation and log-based debugging necessary.

Pipes offered reactive data pipelines and dynamic workflows designed to provide that same real-time visibility: a Pipe started running as soon as any element was connected, using visual indicators to show action. “We wanted the data that is flowing through the ‘pipes’ to be very visible,” Sadri said. An optional text debugger at the bottom of the screen provided additional feedback by displaying the current results as individual items.

“It was really hard to write the wrong program in Pipes,” Sadri noted. “As soon as you dragged something on screen, it would immediately start working and produce some output.”

The quasi-skunkworks operations at Brickhouse had already produced several projects lionized in the technical press in 2007. These included BravoNation, an online system for giving kudos; FireEagle, a service that mediated privacy while providing location information; KickStart, a job placement site for college students (unrelated to the Kickstarter crowdfunding platform); and Yahoo Live, an early offering for live webcam streaming.

None ever turned into successes. Fake went on extended pregnancy and maternity leave starting in April 2007, handing off some roles for that period; she left Yahoo in June 2008. The division head, Bradley Horowitz, left Yahoo for Google in February 2008; Salim Ismail, put in charge of Brickhouse during Fake’s absence, departed in March 2008. Dickerson, who took over TechDev from Fake, left around when she did in mid-2008. Brickhouse was shuttered by the end of that year.

The Pipes team sheared off, too, either leaving Yahoo or joining other teams, handing over support to caretakers within the company.

A few months after the launch of Pipes, Sadri left to establish Polyvore, a platform enabling users to share collages of images, frequently used for fashion and interior design. Polyvore was acquired by Yahoo in 2015; Sadri is now at Sutter Hill Ventures. Ho left around the same time as Sadri; he’s currently a stay-at-home dad. Cheng and Raffel left within a year of Pipes’s launch. Cheng re-engaged with Yahoo in 2014 for nearly two years, and now describes himself as a musician and producer. Raffel’s most recent role was as a product lead at Slack, and he’s currently researching his next venture.

Pipes itself—well, Pipes lingered for years.

Trevor remained at Yahoo through 2010, seeing Pipes through a transition that would otherwise have doomed it then and there. “The reason [Pipes] was even still going when I left was because I’d carried the project with me as I went between different teams,” he explained.

Trevor further elaborated that he rewrote the project from Perl into Java, ensuring compatibility with the internal YQL language, that was, for a time, required for Yahoo projects. Beyond that, “it was only a question of when it was going to be turned off.” Trevor eventually left Yahoo to join Sadri at Polyvore. (He later became the co-founder of Observe, created by Sutter Hill Ventures.)

Visual programming—from no- and low-code tools to “yes code”—is growing in popularity, but to Wilson, it seems odd that graphical tools haven’t been widespread for general purposes. While there could be any number of reasons, one might relate to copyright, though it never quite seemed to crop up for Pipes. As Anil Dash, then an executive at Six Apart, makers of Movable Type and other blogging tools, wrote in a comment on O’Reilly’s benediction on Pipes:

Is the existence of a feed implicit permission for people to subscribe to it? For people to poll it frequently? For people to republish it? Amazingly, almost ten years in, we still don’t have answers on those questions, and now we’re getting into remixing, which is even more fraught.

Sixteen years later, those questions still haven’t been answered, which provides a de facto chilling effect. In the United States and many other countries, there’s no simple way to determine whether copyright is violated without going to court—either being sued or, as with the “Happy Birthday To You” lawsuit, filing for a declarative judgment that something isn’t a copyright violation and spending years and fronting huge sums to win.

That lack of certainty and risk of lawsuits could deter any firm that wanted to launch a free or fee-based service until a landmark case provided strong guidance about what’s acceptable.