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My Heroic and Lazy Stand Against IFTTT

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Re: My Heroic and Lazy Stand Against IFTTT

#91

Post by polm23 »

voltagex_ wrote: post #55
AnkhMorporkian wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What we need is a common interchange protocol, not a specific service.

I don't think you're going to get it. It's the same issue with instant messaging now. There's a business incentive not to allow interoperability. Common interchange of what, though? IFTTT's utility came through connecting disparate services - Reddit to Pinboard, Twitter to Facebook and so on.

If all those services provide JSON blobs, that's halfway to making an RSS feed of them or building a custom search interface or what have you. The other half is standardizing common field names (so you don't have the same field named "created" or "published" or "date" depending on the source); Dublin Core and the like take care of that.

Re: My Heroic and Lazy Stand Against IFTTT

#92

Post by logn »

lindentibbets wrote: post #73

I am the CEO over at IFTTT. I apologize for any misunderstanding our communications today have caused. I built the Pinboard Channel on IFTTT and have maintained it for years. I am also a paying customer of Pinboard! I’ve built for hundreds of platforms and any changes to those platforms by default suck. At IFTTT, we've been on the receiving end of platform changes too many times to count. I want to make sure we do it…

> I’ve built for hundreds of platforms and any changes to those platforms by default suck. At IFTTT, we've been on the receiving end of platform changes too many times to count. I want to make sure we do it better.

I'm reminded of the Joel Spolsky blog post Where there's muck, there's brass: "The trouble is, the market pays for solutions to gnarly problems, not solutions to easy problems." Presumably IFTTT's value was derived from writing these sucky adapters. Now, you want the target sites to write them and your value is derived from this legal agreement, which gives you ownership of these newly outsourced sucky adapters. You have to see how that rubs people the wrong way. If it's an open standard, then at least you're competing on a level playing field and the work these target sites are doing is not all solely for your company's benefit.

Re: My Heroic and Lazy Stand Against IFTTT

#93

Post by pzone »

AlexandrB wrote: post #84
lindentibbets wrote: post #73

I am the CEO over at IFTTT. I apologize for any misunderstanding our communications today have caused. I built the Pinboard Channel on IFTTT and have maintained it for years. I am also a paying customer of Pinboard! I’ve built for hundreds of platforms and any changes to those platforms by default suck. At IFTTT, we've been on the receiving end of platform changes too many times to count. I want to make sure we do it…

> At IFTTT, we've been on the receiving end of platform changes too many times to count. I want to make sure we do it better. I've never used IFTTT, but my understanding is that this is the biggest value IFTTT provides - tying together a set of normally incompatible services. If you're now pushing this work onto the services themselves what is the value add that IFTTT provides? And wouldn't the internet be better off…

Connecting to IFTTT provides some value to the sites too. It's not like IFTTT is pillaging the client sites here. Clearly most of the services have seen enough value to do these upgrades, not just once but multiple times.

Re: My Heroic and Lazy Stand Against IFTTT

#94

Post by fenomas »

hyperhopper wrote: post #11
msbarnett wrote: post #9

> 11. Compatibility. Each Licensee Channel must maintain 100% compatibility with the Developer Tool and the Service including changes provided to you by IFTTT, which shall be implemented in each Channel promptly thereafter. > 17.This Agreement is personal to Licensee and may not be assigned or transferred for any reason [...]. IFTTT expressly reserves the right to assign this Agreement and to delegate any of its obli…

I'm surprised that a majority must have signed already, for them to actually make the switch. Hopefully this costs them a lot of buisiness and they have to revert.

The author noted in the comments that nobody signs it, it's a passive "By using our developer site you agree.." agreement.

Re: My Heroic and Lazy Stand Against IFTTT

#95

Post by timv »

lindentibbets wrote: post #73

I am the CEO over at IFTTT. I apologize for any misunderstanding our communications today have caused. I built the Pinboard Channel on IFTTT and have maintained it for years. I am also a paying customer of Pinboard! I’ve built for hundreds of platforms and any changes to those platforms by default suck. At IFTTT, we've been on the receiving end of platform changes too many times to count. I want to make sure we do it…

> I apologize for any misunderstanding our communications today have caused

I'm not so sure there is a misunderstanding.

The facts seem relatively clear:

- You want services to implement your proprietary API so that IFTTT integration with their service runs more smoothly.

- Your business success is predicated on other services providing those APIs, but you want them to do the work for no reward.

- You have license terms that protect your interests, but not theirs.

- If a service isn't interested in playing by your rules you'll remove them from IFTTT to the detriment of your own users.

- You call Pinboard a "beloved service", but not so "beloved" that you're willing to support their existing API, just "beloved" enough to graciously allow them do build an implementation of your API.

The only misunderstanding seems to be that you think that's somehow reasonable, and most of us don't.

> we've been on the receiving end of platform changes too many times to count. I want to make sure we do it better

You know that API changes are painful, so you want to push that pain onto services like Pinboard, by forcing them to maintain compatibility with your evolving API.

> The changes we are asking for are indeed more work, but we know they will lead to a better Pinboard Channel on IFTTT

Interpretation: We're expecting Maciej to put more effort in, but it will make our product so much better if he does!

It's your product - shouldn't the effort be yours?

Re: My Heroic and Lazy Stand Against IFTTT

#96

Post by makenova »

I applied to IFTTT about a year ago (didn't get the job), part of the interview process was to develop a channel on their developer platform. I don't consider my self a fast developer but it wasn't difficult and it took me about a weekend of casual work. Maciej is well within his rights to flip IFTTT the bird, but I just wanted to provide some context about how much work is involved.

Re: My Heroic and Lazy Stand Against IFTTT

#97

Post by URSpider94 »

andrewfong wrote: post #51
msbarnett wrote: post #9

> 11. Compatibility. Each Licensee Channel must maintain 100% compatibility with the Developer Tool and the Service including changes provided to you by IFTTT, which shall be implemented in each Channel promptly thereafter. > 17.This Agreement is personal to Licensee and may not be assigned or transferred for any reason [...]. IFTTT expressly reserves the right to assign this Agreement and to delegate any of its obli…

Not saying this is good contract writing, but some relevant context would be what the penalty for breaking these clauses are. If the penalty for not maintaining compatability, as stipulated in the contract, is simply "we turn off IFTTT integration with your app", then that seems reasonable. Ditto for the non-assignment clause. Now if the penalty is three dogs and a pony, then nuts to that.

IANAL, but in general the penalty for breaking the terms of a contract, in the absence of an explicit damages clause, are whatever business loss the other party suffers as a result.

Re: My Heroic and Lazy Stand Against IFTTT

#98

Post by gergles »

fprotthetarball wrote: post #50
ukyrgf wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The RSS feed for saved posts is https://www.reddit.com/user/{ { username }}/saved/.rss

Thank you! I have RSS feeds set to private by default, so I assumed this wouldn't work. However, I did discover "Private RSS feeds" in the reddit preferences. I can likely feed these into Zapier.

You can indeed, I have done this to replicate the main thing I was using ifttt for (saving 'saved' links on reddit to Pinboard.)

Re: My Heroic and Lazy Stand Against IFTTT

#99

Post by BogusIKnow »

lindentibbets wrote: post #73

I am the CEO over at IFTTT. I apologize for any misunderstanding our communications today have caused. I built the Pinboard Channel on IFTTT and have maintained it for years. I am also a paying customer of Pinboard! I’ve built for hundreds of platforms and any changes to those platforms by default suck. At IFTTT, we've been on the receiving end of platform changes too many times to count. I want to make sure we do it…

"we've been on the receiving end of platform changes too many times to count."

But this is the value you provide, this is your raison d'etre.

Re: My Heroic and Lazy Stand Against IFTTT

#100

Post by fabulist »

guelo wrote: post #83
fabulist wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you are a self-respecting programmer, you should ask yourself if someone has done a better job writing the same tool than you intend to do.

You have been handed down free libraries for RSS and Facebook containing thousands of lines of high quality code. If you can't put the few lines of glue code together and are willing to sacrifice your privacy and random legal restrictions to yet another service just for this little convenience, then... well if you don't respect yourself I'm not going to respect you either.

You are using very strong words to describe a very weak signal, and it comes out sounding like noise.

Self-respecting programmers make lots of good and bad decisions, and trying to exclude someone from that category because they went down a particular path is divisive and unproductive.

If you had said, "I don't see why one would opt to use a service rather than write a script for this very simple task," you might've gotten an interesting answer pointing out something you missed.

No self respecting programmer would throw away the chance to learn a valuable lesson to grandstand.

(Edit: Though I've totally made that mistake before.)

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