IFTTT strikes me as the canonical example of a useful, small project that people would pay for that instead got stars in its eyes. For the moment, it's a great example of venture capitalists subsidizing a useful adapter cable for Internet services. But I get nervous when infrastructure gets delusions of grandeur. If 'cron' suddenly acquired a staff of 40, I would start looking for alternatives.
> If 'cron' suddenly acquired a staff of 40, I would start looking for alternatives.
How accessible is Cron to people?
For the consumer, almost all aspects of computing are becoming ubiquitous: except programming. Tools like those provided by IFTTT are enabling people to do more with their devices.
Someday, programming will also be ubiquitous (it probably won't even be called programming anymore).
This is an excellent point. Cron has to be one of the most difficult pieces of software to use, and it shouldn't be. When I first heard of IFTTT, I thought it was a joke. I thought: "Who needs these services when I can just spin up a VPS somewhere, write a couple of scripts and get the data I want where I need it"... How silly of me. I don't think my mother would like to take VPS Setup 101, Scripting 101 and Sysadmin 101 in order to have recipes from one website show up in her mailbox every morning.
IFTTT and similar products helps productive people build bridges between services they use in order to further improve their productivity. No need to pay for a VPS, manage it, develop API interfaces, etc... It all makes sense... and if they're able to bring that simplicity to event handling in small devices, then that would be great.
They added a Surfline channel last October, so a whole slew of non-technical surfers have started using it to get surf alerts. Granted, that is just one audience, but it is something that people are using it for.
[Why Surfline doesn't provide alerts directly is another conversation]
Maybe everyone will know how to do very basic programming, but there will still be professional programmers. We all know how to plug appliances into electric sockets and work with extension cords, but you still need to call an electrician when you need something more complex or to do a repair.
fair enough, but how many people who can't setup cron need ifttt's functionality? I'm somewhat skeptical.
And even if they do need ifttt, investors need to turn that $30m into $300m. It's almost a sure bet -- unless you believe that somehow advertising is going to pay the bills -- that ifttt will start taxing users, publishers, or both. Which will end up sucking for all of us. Too bad craigslist didn't implement this...
There are lots of folks, who are not developers, who would want to send a linkedin invite to every new twitter follower, or get emails about the top apps in the app store, or log all your text messages to google drive. Heck, developers who don't want to spend the time to build and maintain a system would use it also.
Check out their recipes for a better understanding of how people are using the service: https://ifttt.com/recipes
I don't know, sync seems to me to be one of the canonical Big Problems of computing.
But I don't want anyone to think I'm belittling what IFTTT does, or calling the problem trivial. I wouldn't care if they didn't provide a genuinely useful service. This type of thing just seems poorly served by the startup model of grandiose dreams combined with 95%+ chance of failure.
Except many people need what dropbox does (conveniently move files between ios/android and your computer; conveniently share some files between a work and personal computer), while I don't see the common need for ifttt. The latter may be due to my lack of vision, of course...
> While IFTTT’s dream is for all companies to play nicely together via its open platform...
A closed-source integration service is not an open platform, and this is especially relevant when it is an integration platform. I am betting (and building something towards the same ends) on more people embracing and promoting open alternatives than at any time before. IFTTT's market is huge. There are millions of programmers around the world who'll never write any code outside work, and they vastly outnumber the rest of us. The next step in open and free software will be making coding, forking and deploying apps as easy as editing Wikipedia.
> There are millions of programmers around the world who'll never write any code outside work, and they vastly outnumber the rest of us.
You mean the programmers with healthy work-life balance that have better things to do than waste their free time staring at a text editor? The implication that these "other programmers" are inferior in some way and require IFTTT to integrate services is quite offensive to me.
"Inferior" is a strong word, but coders who are not given time at work to improve their skills (this is usually the case) and who never code/read about coding outside of work stagnate. I've interviewed many people like this - decades of experience, impressive sounding resume - who couldn't do fizzBuzz.
I would prefer to hire someone who has work/life balance and codes for fun on their own time over someone who's strictly a 9-5 developer.
Programming is really fun and cool. But there are other fun and cool things that are not programming. I'm sure sculptors also take brakes from hammering rocks.
I've been waiting for this for literally a decade! Before that, it used to be true on desktop platforms like Windows and Linux - not so on the web and for apps.
There have been many attempts. Things like http://sandstorm.io/ are the latest attempts to try and change this.
> The next step in open and free software will be making coding, forking and deploying apps as easy as editing Wikipedia.
I've been working on something along these lines for quite a while now. I've temporarily taken down the landing page while I get all the ducks in a row and put up the new one, but if you send an email to contact@loggur.com, I'll make sure to contact you when Loggur launches.
Maybe we should use the dns servers for different services? I guess something like a mail record but with PICTURES instead of mail to point to you picture server
@Pinboard: "Right now the IFTTT business model is to charge one user $30M, rather than lots of users $2. The challenge will be with recurring payments"
My personal feelings on IFTTT after using it are that it has a massive potential as an incredible handy tool. However, at the moment the focus seems to be primarily on social media interaction and optimization. This is all well and good, but I would love to see more integration with the features of my Android device.
At this precise moment an example is not jumping to mind, but I know several times now I have seen a trigger option in the list that I could make use of but could not find listed the universal Android feature I wanted to use as the resultant action.
Conversely when trying to create rules for something like having my phone muted in a specific location I had to create two triggers: First a trigger to mute my phone upon entering a location and Second a trigger to turn volume up upon leaving a certain location. Standing back to look at what I was trying do it is easy to understand that yes there are two Ifs that I want my phone to react to (entering an area and leaving it) but having the option to choose "while in area" or "while outside of area" would be great. I think this comes down to a difference between literal if This action then That action and if This idea then That action.
IFTTT is clearly programmed how it operates rather than how people tend to think. As someone that has done programming, I get that and can work with it, but it doesn't seem the ideal model for use by the average person.
All this having been said I think it is a fun, wonderful gadget and I look forward to seeing how it grows. Now if only I could figure out why my triggers have been failing of late...
The Zapier founder's primary talent seems to be self-promotion (and they built a cool thing too). They've managed to land guest articles on Techcrunch, I heard they ask other new founders to mention Zapier on YC demo days, I have seem them exploit rivalry among competitors to get them all signed up (X is on Zapier, maybe you should be too), and they've put a lot into the SEO optimization of their pages, generating nearly unique landing pages for every possible combination of the services they offer. This is not criticism, this is praise. I'm kind of in awe.
I've never tried IFTTT, but I have used Zapier and the service is pretty good. My take is that engineers can set up scripts that can connect APIs themselves, which has benefits and drawbacks. Like it takes time to build a script that does this, and you have to keep it up to date as those APIs change, but on the other hand Zapier and probably IFTTT's integrations are very shallow and don't allow you to do much automatic processing of data.
> Zapier and probably IFTTT's integrations are very shallow and don't allow you to do much automatic processing of data.
Given their target market, I see that as their competitive advantage. It's all too easy to appeal to the very technical, and allow them to plugin scripts and filters and whatnot into the pipeline, but by reducing all of that complexity down to "if this, then that" they are much more approachable by a huge audience.
Pinboard has 24K active users[0]. I have some inside info (having previously worked at IFTTT 2 years ago) that this number is significantly less people than use most of IFTTT's channels. It's one of the early channels and taking the time to fix it and migrate everyone is probably not justified for such a small audience.
Also, if Pinboard really wants it updated, add OAuth and contact IFTTT. They have a better solution for them.
It's not a question of migrating anything. The first thing IFTTT does with the password is make an API call to get the API token, and then supposedly throw the password away.
This is literally a request for them to change the name of an input field, and make one less API call. I'm happy to drive to their office and implement it myself if they feel they lack the resources.
Plugin was written early on and there are only 24K users. Therefore it's ok to provide worse security to those 24K users. -> This does not make sense to me given how many of those users will have the same password on their email and IFTTT is going to store it.
This exactly. I understand why they haven't done it, but the number of things I'd love to build as a hobbyist if only I could get a REST endpoint to trigger or enter a webhook URL to receive actions...
We're building a way for others to build and take ownership of their Channels: https://ifttt.com/platform Hobby or personal Channels are an interesting idea!
No, they're not really. We're building Smart IR Remote (universal remote android app) and AnyMote (hardware, now on kickstarter), and we applied on IFTTT's link over a month ago, without any reply. Didn't even get back to us.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but Dweet doesn't really solve the use case of "I want to connect my hobby app with existing third-party APIs without having to do manual integrations". It's great for home IoT setups, sure, but that's not the main use case I care about.
"There's a big strategic risk in you guys offering web hooks: it facilitates competitors piggybacking on your event detection and building high value response services that compete directly with your own. In other words, you become a piece of costly-to-maintain middleware and others capture the real consumer value." -- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4344335
In other words, something like webhooks hurts the bottom line of this "open platform" (quote from OP.) Maybe IFTTT is only useful because a lot of the services it consumes don't make it easy to do these things, because it would diminish their own value. It's greedy walled gardens all the way down.
Anyone else want the phrase "internet of things" to die? I guess it's not rational, but it just bugs me more and more every time it comes up. Too buzz-wordy or something.
IFTTT is at a great spot to bring simple programming & logic to non-programmers who just want to customize how they interact with technology just a little bit. Looks like Yahoo Pipes missed a big opportunity there.
However, the IFTTT homepage and WTF page are still too complicated for a casual visitor. The WTF page throws all these terms like Channels, Triggers, Actions, Ingredients, Recipes, etc instead of focusing on telling the visitor what they can do with IFTTT. The name (If This Then That) is amazing for explaining what IFTTT is. But, beyond that, they seem to be making things look more complicated than they need to be.
I completely agree - I don't necessarily know what better would exactly look like - but explaining the why as opposed to the what is a great place to start.
IFTTT really is not that complicated, it is something that many people realistically could utilize, even if they aren't very tech savy. Something as simple as a beginner mode which hides everything except complete recipes from the user might go a long way in appealing to a broader user base.
Interesting no one mentioned Huginn [1]. It's open, and perfect for "internet of things" stuff. I've done some of the basic IOT stuff that's mentioned in the article with Huginn (open doors at specific times, turn on lights etc).
Sure it might not be as pretty as IFTTT (and I'm sure however IFTTT implement interfaces for IOT stuff will look great.. $30MM great) but they're working on it.
Number one feature request for IFTTT: support multiple conditions, i.e. if this AND this AND this then that
As is stands now, for me, IFTTT is cute (I've played around with the app and website) but not really useful for many things without multiple conditions.
I developed an IFTTT integration in the last couple of weeks. Their support team was very helpful. They even shared some sample code with me via GitHub. Their documentation was great and I really liked their built in regression test.
I'd bet $100M on IFTTT if I had it. They've got an amazing ecosystem of often proprietary devices and services feeding event information into them.
v1 is rules by end-users—v10 intelligence by the system.
What if they could take that data and create concepts around the identity of people using those devices, where they are at certain times, what they're doing, etc. etc. Turn all that data around and broker it back to services/devices, making each of the providers that much more powerful but dependent upon IFTTT. It's super-charging the internet of things in a way that perhaps only Google (with Google Now) seems to be thinking.
... and that's one reason why I won't use it for anything meaningful. I'm tired of my digital activities simply becoming fodder for a third party's data mining.
Answer whether I need an umbrella today (will have to know where I work, when I go to work, lunch, home.)
Currently I can only build an alert on whether it'll rain tomorrow. I end up having to check Google Now, and sliding across the hours of the day to make a judgment about whether it's worth it or not to bring an umbrella.
I especially want that for scheduling of recipes. Right now they run all the time, but there are definitely things I only want to run at specific times on specific days. For instance:
"If it's 7:00 AM [AND] it's a weekday [AND] the forecast is rain [THEN] Tell me to bring an umbrella" would be much more useful to me than getting notifications every time it's going to rain.
As it stands now with a single condition, I don't can't come up with much I want to do with IFTTT.
IFTTT is in an excellent position to help users and the IoT industry solve the problem of non-standardization of clouds/APIs. For now they just enable a lot of simple "recipes", but they can now go WAY BEYOND this and make the "everything app" that let's me view/control/mashup all of my devices and social media, etc. Having the huge ecosystem already nailed down puts them so far ahead of everybody. I would pay for this app, but many will not. They could be a great acquisition play for a company that wants to dominate at this layer and is late to the game.
Wow, I'm amazed by the progress. I remember when IFTTT was above the DevBootcamp hq on 5th and Market and I stopped by to visit (which would have been early-mid 2012). I remember the cute dog and still have some craigslist alerts going that I set up shortly after. Also remember talking about their goal of getting the average person to do programming-like tasks in terms of setting up chains of conditionals and actions.
Also, the name still makes me think of Riften from Skyrim.
Having developed a couple of "wearable" computing products, I can appreciate what IFTTT offers for early adopting consumers. Most companies making new products don't have the time to work on too many integrations (not to mention all the contractual stuff to even be able to start). They give the early adopter a way around at least some of that problem, and I know a significant number of users appreciate that.
What is interesting to me is that IFTTT is running as a cloud platform, yet some of these devices won't be accessible outside the wireless LAN. I wonder if they are going to have to create a hardware piece, software service or something that communicates to their servers and translates the scripted commands and relevant statuses.
But also, this is a huge market and someone needs to do this.
I really like automators like IFFT as they save the time from having to yet again keep up with breaking API changes from crappy company xyz (ex: Facebook). The problem with all of them seems they don't actually work reliably.
I tried IFFT a number of times. I'd love for it to work, but I only use it as a "it's ok if this breaks, missing data, etc." tool. Admittedly this is not 100% their fault as you are at the mercy of the shoddiness of other APIs, but bugs upon bugs and the less than reliable nature of IFFT actually executing things in a timely, durable manner makes it 100x less useful and impossible to build on top of for real apps.
I also feel that from a business point of view, relying on other people's services is consistently a trap. Whether it's social networks like Twitter, COTS like SharePoint, or something like Evernote, it's always a trap. These businesses can break your code at any time they choose, shut off your service, or simply go under. It takes a lot of work circumventing their bugs and terrible APIs as well. Hats off for trying, but I don't feel like a company like this is usually a good long-term investment.
Add to these problems the fact that most internet "typical" users would never use IFFT or "get it" the way it's presented today. Moreover, most programmers want more control, something more powerful, or can just do everything here better themselves exactly to their use cases. Not seeing how this company is worth much even if it is "useful." Profitable != useful many times.
IFTT and Zapier are two of the most exciting companies to watch in tech right now. Why? Because automation and programming are still inaccessible to most people, but the need and interest is widespread. IFTT and Zapier, both of which I use, are racing for breadth of services they integrate as opposed to depth of a service's API they expose/support. I think that is a mistake. I also believe the first of the two to support industrial devices, a robust security model and open source hardware will run dominate the space. There are only so many Mailchimp, Salesforce, Google Docs integrations of value - but infinite use cases for device integration. On this score perhaps IFTT has a lead. IFTT and Zapier are what, IMHO, Apple's Automator should have been. I think Apple may have missed the mark throwing resources at Swift, when the much larger market is end-user integrations. I might add applications like Tasker and Locale on Android add a ton of value to those platforms, at the expense of the iPhone, and Apple remains largely absent on the integration front.
IFTTT looks like a great concept that will be replicated in the near future from other services following the massive growth that the internet of things, specially wearable devices will bring to the internet ecosystem.
Very interesting... paid IFTTT account, I'm quite sceptical about that, I would expect the licensing contracts with Philips, Belkin, et al. are the main revenue source and will remain to be it in future...
IFTTT surely has a lot of potential. IOT device management might become a problem for normal users, if IOT does become mainstream in the future.
The normal scenarios which we can think of right now for example coming home and things turn on to appropriate settings, blocking phones during meetings etc are surely easy for us to understand, but my parents if they figure these things out and can setup such tasks them selves, I see a huge market and use for such services. It is still too geeky for normal people, it needs to provide use cases for normal folks not just tweeps or facebook generation.
IFTTT needs the money, their servers used to be slow when I last used it.
