Yahoo shuts down Pipes, Maps and other services

Yahoo Inc. announced the shut down of several company products including Yahoo Maps and Pipes yesterday.

Yahoo Pipes, which we first covered back in 2008 here on ComTek4u, is one of the prominent products that Yahoo selected to discontinue.

The service allowed you to collect and use data from around the web to create new products or information based services.

For instance, Pipes allowed you to combine multiple RSS feeds into a single feed, turn feeds that display only a summary to full feeds, or watch item price developments on eBay or other sites.

It allowed you to use Pipes created by other users or create your own. The two-staged shutdown of Pipes begins August 30, 2015 when the service won't support the creation of new Pipes anymore. Existing pipes will remain available in read-only mode until September 30, 2015 when the service is shut down for good.

Pipe creators who want to download their creations can export pipes to json format by using the following url structure: http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.info?_id=ZKJobpaj3BGZOew9G8evXg&_out=…

The only part that needs to be modified is the ID which is clearly visible on the Pipes website.

Yahoo Pipes alternatives

You may want to check out the following Pipes alternatives:

• ClickScript - A visual programming language that looks similar to Pipes It is open source and can be tested directly on the site without creation of an account.
• Quadrigram - A business tool to create and publish data driven websites.
• Superpipes - An open source tool build with Superfeedr.

The second popular product that Yahoo decided to shut down is Yahoo Maps. The company announced that it will shut down Yahoo Maps at the end of June 2015.

While the main maps interface is shut down, access remains on several Yahoo products such as search or Flickr which have integrated the mapping service.

Yahoo Maps alternatives

The following mapping services can be used instead:

• Bing Maps
• Google Maps
• Here Maps
• OpenStreetMap

Several other products are mentioned on the official Yahoo blog:

1. Yahoo Mail support on older iOS devices. Yahoo won't support the built-in mail application on pre-iOS 5 devices starting June 15, 2015. The company recommends to use a browser instead to load mail.yahoo.com in it.
2. Yahoo Contacts syncing on older Macs: Yahoo Contacts syncing won't be supported anymore on Mac OS X 10.7 or earlier starting June 15, 2015. The company recommends to use the web interface instead.
3. GeoPlanet and PlaceSpotter APIs: The two APIs will be retired in the third quarter of 2015. Yahoo recommends to switch to Yahoo Query Language and Boss instead.
4. Yahoo Music will be closed in France and Canady in mid-June.
5. Yahoo Movies will be closed in Spain in mid-June.
6. The Yahoo Philippines homepage will be shut down and be redirected to Yahoo Singapore instead.
7. Yahoo TV will be shut down in the UK, France, Germany, Spain, Italy and Canada at the end of June.
8. Yahoo Autos will be shut down in the UK, France, Germany, Spain and Italy at the same time.
9. Yahoo Entertainment in Singapore shuts down in early July.

Now You: Are you affected by the shut down?