In the sense that even corporate sites if you found it would have a little corner where the 'webmaster' had a page that mentioned the server, or his cat, or some silly pic. Some sort of character or tidbit before any of the branding drones were really aware of the web. All just because the 'webmaster' was the only one really in charge / who understood the site was even there and they wanted to share.
I suspect to some extent the APIs were the same. Someone who really didn't mind was all "Yeah sure if someone wants to see what I did.. awesome."
Or a “links” page. I haven’t seen that in a long while. No affiliate garbage or anything just a page linking to other sites that the webmaster liked or whatever. It’s hard to remember when that fell out of fashion but it did seem to add a personal touch as well.
I've always wanted to pay it forward in the same way, but lots of things on the web seem overly complicated now that'd make that hard to do, and I've lost attachment to most communities.
I remember those times, I miss them. I had a modem back in the late 1990s and used to buy .net magazine (in the UK, back before there was a framework of the same name) on my way home from school and it had the number of people estimated to be on the Internet printed on the spine. It all seemed too good to be true, we were worried it might get shut down by governments. There was the TV program "the net" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Net_(British_TV_series)) that used to give you an "info dump" at the end that you were meant to record on your VCR and play back frame by frame.
In Jan 2000 I got my first proper job at a web hosting company and used to read Wired magazine before it became (as far as I recall) fascinated by the stock market.
I miss the optimism and simplicity of those times.
It seems like every generation (minus those who came of age in WWI/II) think this is true for them.
Is it really true, or are we just all reflecting back to when we were younger and the world was simpler because we understood less.
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?
What I likes with Yahoo Pipes compared to NodeRED (at least as far as I looked at NodeRED, I might be wrong) is that Yahoo Pipes worked out-of-the-box with services out of the box. I seem to remember that you could use the Google Search API for example, with Yahoo Pipes and pipe that into other things. That's what Zapier does as well, but with less flexibility than NodeRED.
So I guess my dream would be something like the integrations provided by Zapier but with the UI and flexibility of NodeRED.
Haven't seen pipes.digital before, I'll take a look as it looks interesting, but for anything serious, open source is a hard requirement (gotta learn from the Yahoo Pipes history :) )
r-w is right though: More users paying for pipes would allow me to invest more time into it and have more requirements covered.
It reminds me of zapier, which reminds me of Yahoo pipes.
Unfortunately, it looks like it's not open-source, their Github repo is only for bug reports: https://github.com/pipes-digital/pipes
A Yahoo pipes! clone really needs some open source love. Too bad the maintainer is more interested in making it a one man SaaS.
The video is interesting because I thought he was talking specifically to me about the http://2fb.me product. But anyway I think this is a reminder that even though API’s have gotten more restrictive that more creative ways of using them bubble to the surface. :)
I guess that's fair.
I want(ed) to run Pipes as an SaaS because I think that model would be highly advantageous to me, and that would be very advantageous for Pipes. But that with the predecessors history as background this approach is a critical concern is something I do understand. I will now try to have my cake and eat it too: https://github.com/pipes-digital/pipes contains a new FOSS version that is meant to exist in parallel with pipes.digital, as long as that model works out. So worst case now is this FOSS approach fails, and then only the SaaS would die, not the software.
Researchers are passing around lists of tweet IDs ("dehydrated", they call them) that can be "rehydrated" (that is, turned back into full tweets) if you have the right permission from twitter to do so.
The whole setup is really shameful.
It would be de-facto illegal to build a "Google for Twitter" today. I settled on doing it for ActivityPub/Mastodon because it's less likely I'll get sued into oblivion for creating a search engine that way.
I am working on some fediverse aggregator projects. Let me know if you want to talk.
Nowadays you'd need to sign up for an API key, probably pay some amount of money, and provide twenty different forms of contact to use something like that. That's assuming it was allowed to exist in the first place, since it might take views away from google.com.
For a while it was common to find SEO-spam sites composed entirely of posts generated this way. They would translate from a source language back to it in a roundabout way and end up with an article that was "different enough" to count as unique content to Google.
> In 2012, Google blacklisted 19 of the Shapps's business websites for violating rules on copyright infringement related to the web scraping-based TrafficPayMaster software sold by them
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grant_Shapps#Business_ventures
> It cost $497 and promised customers earnings of $20,000 in 20 days. Upon purchase,
> the "toolkit" was revealed to be an ebook, advising the user to create their own
> toolkit and recruit 100 "Joint Venture Partners" to resell it for a share of the
> profits
Sort of like a pyramid scheme, really. Incredibly this appears to have scarcely affected him, he is still an MP :-O
It didn't help that a lot of Web 2.0 darlings sold out to on-the-way-out Web 1.0 companies \cough\Yahoo\cough\. Yahoo's management couldn't even monetize money, let alone Web 2.0 properties. So instead we got social media silos. You can put stuff in but good luck ever getting it out. You can share it with whomever so long as they also join the same silo.
1. they enable people to do things that other people think shouldn't be done
2. people get upset at companies when (1) happens
3. people get upset at companies for removing or restricting apis when, or in fear of, both (1) and (2).
If you create a popular API, people are going to find creative uses for it, and because they can, by definition, be automated, you can get rapid growth in traffic with not that many users.
There is a bit of a 'tragedy of the commons' that goes on, because the people writing apps that consume the API have no incentive to moderate their usage, or try to be efficient.
Since the company that is providing this API is paying for the resources to run it, they can quickly get very expensive. Unless there is a clear financial benefit for allowing it to continue, most companies will shut them down eventually.
Even if you had to pay 1 satoshi for 10 queries, it would go a long way towards making APIs viable long-term.
There's even ongoing work on making paid API's work seamlessly by adding some middleware, using the HTTP 402 (payment required) status code, no usernames/e-mails/passwords involved: https://lightning.engineering/posts/2020-03-30-lsat/
(And yes, LN is open source, non-custodial and moves real Bitcoin, not IOU's or other tokens. It's actually an open spec with at least 3 major implementations in 3 different languages.)
Just less money to be made by those with the power to restrict it
Private property is just a monopoly right to exclude others from the use of something. If they could have used it, it would have been another instance of adding to the value. But someone has to pop up and demand rents and restrict them from doing so. Doesn’t that overall reduce the value of the information?
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.