With $30M More in Hand, IFTTT Looks to the Internet of Things
bits.blogs.nytimes.com
bits.blogs.nytimes.com
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.
[Why Surfline doesn't provide alerts directly is another conversation]
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...
Check out their recipes for a better understanding of how people are using the service: https://ifttt.com/recipes
Agreed on your second point.
"Premium accounts are on the way!
We are working to make IFTTT even more valuable to you. "
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.
Also, one might have said the same thing about github.
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.
Github?
I believe that Github is exactly what the OP is complaining about.
There have been many attempts. Things like http://sandstorm.io/ are the latest attempts to try and change this.
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.
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.
Is this how you see programming?
Something tells me you wouldn't be a very good programmer.
"Why would a sculptor waste their free time hammering rocks?"
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.
We should launch within the next week or two!
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...
http://blog.matt.thomm.es/post/63394262428/zapier-versus-if-...
In case others had the same question.
http://www.quora.com/Whats-the-difference-between-Zapier-and...
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.
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.
Also, if Pinboard really wants it updated, add OAuth and contact IFTTT. They have a better solution for them.
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.
This one thing would blow up usage by developers across the board.
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.
Also, there is still a lot of value that can be added by the middleware besides repeated polling, such as filtering and facilitating easy setup
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Google Now integration
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.
Slightly off topic, but has anyone figured out a good way to use IFTTT to do "If this AND this then that" type of recipes?
"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.
Also, the name still makes me think of Riften from Skyrim.
But also, this is a huge market and someone needs to do this.
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.
It's a fun place with cool stuff going on.
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.