I had dinner the other night in Christ’s and as I was walking out through Front Court, with the Master’s Lodge in the far corner, I was suddenly reminded of C.P. Snow’s novel The Masters and fell to musing that, at least architecturally, not much had changed since the events recorded in the book. I re-read it recently, and concluded that, as a novel, it’s rather feeble. But as a sociological study of a part of Cambridge society in the 1930s it’s actually rather good, and I suspect pretty accurate.

Sigh. One of the (few) great things that Yahoo did. And they’re dumping it.

Most heartbreakingly for a lot of developers, Yahoo Pipes is getting shut down at the end of August. Yahoo Pipes is a service that let people build custom web applications that could pull in all kinds of data from all over the internet.

When Pipes launched back in 2007, it was widely heralded as ahead of its time. Tech expert Tim O’Reilly called Pipes “a milestone in the history of the internet.” It was sort of a precursor to Mashery, which helps companies manage and blend data from different sources (including public web sources), and If This Then That (ifttt), which lets people create simple “recipes” like “text me the weather every morning” by combining different data sources and apps.

But Yahoo never seemed to know what to do with it; it never got as many users as the company would have liked, and so now it’s going to be cut.

My colleague Tony Hirst did some great stuff with Pipes. I even built stuff with it myself.

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