The mashup years of The Internet
Maybe Nostr enables us to revive and pick up where we left off?
”Users dragged and dropped elements in a web browser to roll their own information feeds, taking published items from websites in many formats—news, database outputs, and blog posts among them. Pipes’ users could then merge the results, filter and process them, and produce a regularly updated stream that could be subscribed to in a desktop app—or texted to a phone. Geotagged results could even pass through a Yahoo Maps filter to restrict results based on location and proximity to features like parks or city neighborhoods…
Pipes output could be embedded into a page or formatted as HTML, JSON, KML, RSS, or XML. There was even a way for a non-Yahoo website to include JavaScript that queried a Pipe workflow and received the results back without any front-end browser or back-end server involvement. Pipes, in effect, could power other sites….
The proposition was that Pipes would not only require no formal programming—it wouldn’t allow any. Instead, every task would be accomplished by dragging and dropping nodes within a browser window, and drawing links between them to indicate control and data flow.”