I was telling a friend recently about how there was this "golden age" when you could access all sorts of free APIs, and how I still long for this time.

I remember the public Netflix API, Twitter APIs and Flickr API with particular fondness. My personal site was a big mashup of all of my data.

I also abused the hell out of Yahoo Pipes - I would run RSS feeds through like 15 different languages with Babelfish before back to English, just for kicks.

My friend seemed very skeptical such a time ever existed.

> I also abused the hell out of Yahoo Pipes - I would run RSS feeds through like 15 different languages with Babelfish before back to English, just for kicks.

Yahoo Pipes was one of the greatest services I used, just when I started getting into programming. Maybe it was so cool because I was naive, but I really miss being able to pipe services together in the same way. Anyone know of any similar attempts that is open source + offers a hosted version with paid plans?

For a self hosted Yahoo Pipes alternative I’d recommend checking out Huginn - it’s been featured on HN a couple of times and the creator is tectonic@HN

https://github.com/huginn/huginn