Yahoo Pipes

Cause of death

Killed by indifference

Made by

Yahoo

Yahoo killed Pipes in a 2015 cull of products it had stopped investing in, announced alongside the shutdown of Yahoo Maps and several regional services.

Pipes let anyone wire feeds, web pages and APIs together into new data mashups by dragging boxes around a canvas, years before IFTTT and Zapier turned that idea into businesses. Its mission statement was to help users 'rewire the web', and for a while it was the closest thing to a programmable internet that required no code. Yahoo swept it up in a 2015 clearance of neglected products alongside Yahoo Maps: new pipes could not be created after 30 August 2015, and the service went off entirely on 30 September, more than eight years after its February 2007 beta.