Indifference Toward "If This Then That" (ifttt) | Hacker News Reader

Indifference Toward "If This Then That" (ifttt)

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7 pointsCMartucci12 comments

I don't understand why people take such a cynical attitude towards new things.

If you bothered to think or look around a bit, you would notice that some people are already using ifttt for things, which a lot of people might find useful, such as tracking jobs, apartments and flights. (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2970550).

If you have no use for something, why blog about it with an undertone implying it has no use for anyone?

Maybe it's not your intention, but this just comes across as taking the mickey out of people's creations just for the heck of it. Just because you've got a blog.

Sometimes, it's best not to say anything. Enjoy the silence while it lasts.

Did you even read the last sentence?

"Don’t get me wrong, ifttt sounds like an excellent service for those who require it. For what it’s worth, I am not one of those people. At least not at the moment."

Chris, I did read it. But then I don't see why you posted it to HN.

I suppose you'd be in the minority if you found relevance in my specific concerns, or if you found it pertinent to your situation. But I didn't think that should forbid me from posting it.

I can understand why it seems pointless, and I suppose HN was not the best venue.

Also, given your attitude toward pointlessly knocking something for the heck of it, where does that put your comment?

Missing the bigger picture IMO.

Sure, the popular recipes seem to be of the archive/backup/life hack variety. YMMV on those.

But I'm already finding ifttt helpful for customer development for my startup (Cilantro).

I've got tasks that search various Craigslist computer gigs for the word "restaurant" and emails me. These are usually restaurant owners looking to build a new site. I can then email them back and say "hey I'm building this restaurant homepage tool. I'd love for you to give it a try" ... its already worked a couple times.

Give ifttt a chance and get creative with it.

hahahaha, the writer of this article doesnt use fb, evernote, or have an interest in tablet pcs... Somehow I doubt he is ifttt's target audience. Its like me, an apartment dweller, writing a blog post about how im indefferent to lawn mowers, cuz I have no use for them, which is to say, really kinda pointless.

Consider it my response to people who say "How are you not using ifttt? It's so good!" Well, here's why. It's not completely pointless -- I wanted to figure out how I felt about the service, and now I know. If my comments are useful to others, then great. If it's pointless to you, then that's fine as well.

There's a lot of room to grow here. Mostly the choices in channels are limited. I think that if people could write and share channels through some API, a ton of use cases could pop up.

This reminds me of Yahoo Pipes, but with webhooks instead of pubsub. Although, it seems they are using polling instead of webhooks.

This has been my response to ifttt thus far. Because I've got a smartphone, I've set up one task to email me something in response to an RSS feed item just to test it out.

However, the beauty of the concept as I see it is: all it takes is one killer recipe for me to get hooked.

As a developer, I could probably recreate any recipe for myself pretty minimally. But I like the design of the site enough that I'm willing to save myself the minimal hassle and use their interface.

If I'm not mistaken, the concept is basically the same as Yahoo Pipes, no? Or a simplified version of it. I loved the idea of Yahoo Pipes but found using it a bit of a hassle for one reason or another. ifttt has factored out the hassle.

What both Yahoo Pipes and ifttt are missing which would make them much more useful to me are a way to scrape a web page (one that doesn't have an RSS feed) and then filter the information I may want out of that.

My personal problem with that service is that there is very nearly no reason for it to be a service. It ought to be a program you run locally. (Observation: For the vast majority of things that is doing, you only care about whether your "ifttt" is occurring when you are actively online.) Even as the current software, packaged up, and accessed through a web client locally. This is a case where the service disempowers people, when it should be empowering them.

Flagged for pissing in people's Cheerios. The HN community is better than this.

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