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My Heroic and Lazy Stand Against IFTTT

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Re: My Heroic and Lazy Stand Against IFTTT

#21

Post by msbarnett »

seanalltogether wrote: post #16

Can someone elaborate more on the "Working for Free" section? I'm not well versed in IFTTT, but shouldn't I as the owner of a website that wants to offer a recipe be responsible for the details that recipe? This is all very unclear without specific examples.

The site doesn't provide recipes, it provides endpoints (API calls) that users can write recipes to use.

How it worked until now:

1) IFTTT wrote glue code to interface with a site's published API, and IFTTT could then write recipes to use the site. IFTTT thus stitched together other sites published APIs as a service.

How IFTTT has decided it will work from now on:

1) IFTTT comes to you and orders you to write private endpoint(s) that do X, Y, and Z. They reserve the right to ask for additional endpoints, different call results, or anything else they dream up down the road. You sign a legal agreement promising to ask "how high?" any time they say "jump". You will not be compensated for this privilege.

Re: My Heroic and Lazy Stand Against IFTTT

#23

Post by klenwell »

If you've never heard of it, If-This-Then-That is a service that lets you connect websites together, so that things that happen in one place automatically trigger some regrettable action someplace else. For example, you might write an IFTTT ‘recipe’ that tweets anything you post on Facebook, because you are a monster.

I'd heard of it (I may have even signed up with it at some point), but this has to be the best explanation of IFTTT I've come across.

Re: My Heroic and Lazy Stand Against IFTTT

#24

Post by fprotthetarball »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #17

I hadn't seen Botize before. In structure and capabilities, it looks a lot more promising to me than either IFTTT or Zapier (for instance, it supports maintaining lists and adding/selecting data from them), except that half the site seems to be localized to Spanish and doesn't seem to have an option anywhere to change the site language.

Tried migrating my IFTTT recipes to Zapier and hit a roadblock on the very first one -- bookmarking posts I have saved in Reddit.

Botize apparently has no Reddit integration.

There's a definite opportunity here. I'd even pay more money for Pinboard (on top of the archival fee) for more Pinboard-specific integrations for things like this. It is too convenient.

Re: My Heroic and Lazy Stand Against IFTTT

#25

Post by dmerrick »

Depending on when the channel was introduced, the backend implementation of a channel can vary wildly. Some were written in Node, others in Ruby, some where written internally, others were written by the service owners.

When IFTTT released the developer platform, they were solving two needs: 1) creating a consistent channel infrastructure, and 2) providing a tool for developers to write channels so they don't have to.

It seems like they are shutting down some of their legacy services, which is probably a good plan for a company with no revenue stream. Not a good plan, however, to make it look like it is the developers' fault.

Re: My Heroic and Lazy Stand Against IFTTT

#26

Post by dave2000 »

msbarnett wrote: post #21
seanalltogether wrote: post #16

Can someone elaborate more on the "Working for Free" section? I'm not well versed in IFTTT, but shouldn't I as the owner of a website that wants to offer a recipe be responsible for the details that recipe? This is all very unclear without specific examples.

The site doesn't provide recipes, it provides endpoints (API calls) that users can write recipes to use. How it worked until now: 1) IFTTT wrote glue code to interface with a site's published API, and IFTTT could then write recipes to use the site. IFTTT thus stitched together other sites published APIs as a service. How IFTTT has decided it will work from now on: 1) IFTTT comes to you and orders you to write private…

Wouldn't you be performing this work because you believe it will facilitate the transfer of traffic to your site? Aren't you comitting to make changes as and when ifttt change their API so that you can continue to receive their calls? Sites/services can just walk away if they don't want the traffic. No one's obliged to pay or do anything they don't want to.

Re: My Heroic and Lazy Stand Against IFTTT

#28

Post by esperluette »

I agree that this is dumb of IFTTT.

But I am all in favor of a 'recipe' that consists of "startup does dumb stuff=>Maciej writes a hilarious takedown=>I LOL so hard people ask me what's going on from two rooms away". Can someone implement the API for that, please?

Re: My Heroic and Lazy Stand Against IFTTT

#30

Post by cissou »

dave2000 wrote: post #26
msbarnett wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The site doesn't provide recipes, it provides endpoints (API calls) that users can write recipes to use. How it worked until now: 1) IFTTT wrote glue code to interface with a site's published API, and IFTTT could then write recipes to use the site. IFTTT thus stitched together other sites published APIs as a service. How IFTTT has decided it will work from now on: 1) IFTTT comes to you and orders you to write private…

Wouldn't you be performing this work because you believe it will facilitate the transfer of traffic to your site? Aren't you comitting to make changes as and when ifttt change their API so that you can continue to receive their calls? Sites/services can just walk away if they don't want the traffic. No one's obliged to pay or do anything they don't want to.

It is correct in the sense that they're not forcing anyone to use IFTTT, but they make it sound like the website owner is responsible for the degradation of service, while in reality it's IFTTT's decision.
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