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Comment by idlewords | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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).

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.

> How accessible is Cron to people?

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.

Are non-technical people really interested in scripting thing using IFTTT?

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]

Yes.. us mortals want results. I personally don't care what script,API,recipe is used as long as the end result is the desired effect.

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

Agreed on your second point.

If you go to the accounts page, you'll see this text

"Premium accounts are on the way!

We are working to make IFTTT even more valuable to you. "

Using any computer in any fashion is technically programming that computer.

You could say the same about rsync/ftp and Dropbox, but they seem to be doing fine.

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...

It's never enough to offer a useful service. You need to be the company that Changes Everything.

Making web versions of classic Unix utilities has been a successful business model.

With autonomous sensors and radio beacons coming I can see a multitude of use cases involving IFTTT.

Also, one might have said the same thing about github.

Agreed.

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