Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

My Heroic and Lazy Stand Against IFTTT

blog.pinboard.in

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 223 posts

Re: My Heroic and Lazy Stand Against IFTTT

#121

Post by ersii »

lindentibbets wrote: post #87
zrgiu_ wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody is even answering our emails/applications for an IFTTT channel so I'm going to shamelessly hook in here and ask: who do small companies (that's what startups are, right?) have to bribe to get bigger companies to even look down at us and exchange an email or two ? And PLEASE don't tell me to "just fill out the form at http://ifttt.com/platform" , tired of that already. We have hundreds of thousands of active us…

Our apologies! We are smaller than you think :) Send me an email at my first name at ifttt.com

Could you clarify if you actually have someone that is responsible for reading and responding on the official contact channel (http://ifttt.com/platform) for "Partnership" Inquiries?

Re: My Heroic and Lazy Stand Against IFTTT

#122

Post by Asparagirl »

swanson wrote: post #101
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…

My hobby: role-playing how I would respond as the CEO if my company was getting skewered on HN. Here is my version! --- I am [not] the CEO over at IFTTT. We messed up. Big time. Pinboard -- and other services developers love -- played an important role in our success thus far and we dropped the ball with the roll-out of our new platform. We have a shared incentive: to make channels work reliably for our end-users. To…

I think your hobby could be a MVP for the first CAaaS -- CEO Apologies As A Service.

(If you act fast, Theranos could be your first Enterprise customer.)

Re: My Heroic and Lazy Stand Against IFTTT

#123

Post by bambax »

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…

Being CEO of IFTTT must not be a very demanding job if you offer to come over to every service that connects to your platform, in order to contribute to coding their API.

Joking aside, Maciej isn't asking for "more time", he's asking for:

1. Money, if he has to do your work for you

2. Some kind of guaranty that your undocumented, private API won't change without notice in the future, rendering all this work useless

3. Legal terms that would be acceptable, ie that would not attempt to rob him blind of all intellectual property regarding any work in relation to your service (from which he derives exactly zero money!) and that would not prevent him from competing with you.

Your answer so far does not even attempt to address any of those points.

Re: My Heroic and Lazy Stand Against IFTTT

#124

Post by jonny_eh »

zrgiu_ wrote: post #86
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…

Nobody is even answering our emails/applications for an IFTTT channel so I'm going to shamelessly hook in here and ask: who do small companies (that's what startups are, right?) have to bribe to get bigger companies to even look down at us and exchange an email or two ? And PLEASE don't tell me to "just fill out the form at http://ifttt.com/platform" , tired of that already. We have hundreds of thousands of active us…

> Go ahead and downvote to the abyss

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> Please resist commenting about being downvoted. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading

Re: My Heroic and Lazy Stand Against IFTTT

#125

Post by rtpg »

timv wrote: post #95
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 te…

On the other side of the spectrum, do you expect Slack to maintain the Slack integration you write for your webapp? Do you expect Microsoft to maintain Excel plugins?

Of course they might do so for a couple vital ones to help jumpstart the integration system, but it's not black and white.

IFTTT is a bit different because this is their value-add. But is it so different that you can make a claim that in a context-free environment sounds almost absurd?

On IFTTT I think it's kind of reasonable to expect them to do it, but at the same time the inversion does things like (for example) let me write an IFTTT integration to my own service. You could just as well have both (IFTTT writing integrations, and individuals writing integrations) I imagine.

At one point integrating with IFTTT becomes a value add for both parties, and the delegation of "who should do this" is not obvious.

I don't think it's super clearcut here.

Re: My Heroic and Lazy Stand Against IFTTT

#126

Post by rtpg »

AnkhMorporkian wrote: post #48
voltagex_ wrote: post #35

I'd spend money on a Yahoo Pipes + IFTTT solution with some kind of guarantee they're not going to vanish overnight. You know, like a Pinboard.in style company. I think we need to clone Maciej.

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

This isn't obvious. How do you decide what to do with the information you receive?

How do you encode "Oh, this service lets you tweet, but this one lets you only share links?"

How do you have a protocol that lets you handle both Twitter and Google Calendar?

At one point you're basically making a protocol that's a programming language, and we already have JSON + most languages.

So the answer to this is "JSON, or whatever other dictionary serializer you like".

Re: My Heroic and Lazy Stand Against IFTTT

#127

Post by riking »

darkhorn wrote: post #14
idlewords wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some other people are saying they've seen Chrome complain, but I can't reproduce it. Please send email (support@pinboard.in) if you can figure out what's up.

https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=blog.pinboard... Google Chrome on Android ERR_CERT_AUTHORITY_INVALID You are using obsolute chiper.

The actual problem resulting in untrusted cert is the "extra download" certificates.

Re: My Heroic and Lazy Stand Against IFTTT

#128

Post by icebraining »

jwise0 wrote: post #111

HN meta: I'm sort of disappointed that this has been getting downvoted. Obviously, what Linden is saying in this case is probably not helping his business case. It's clear to me that he either does not understand why Maciej doesn't want to implement a private API, or does not wish to understand it. On the other hand, neither of those things are grounds for a downvote, I think. A downvote says "this content shouldn't…

A downvote says "this content shouldn't be on HN"

Ehh, I'm not sure that's generally accepted. A few years back pg himself did say downvotes could be used for showing simple disagreement, and many people seem to agree even today.

Re: My Heroic and Lazy Stand Against IFTTT

#129

Post by dave2000 »

cissou wrote: post #30
dave2000 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah, but i'm not getting how they're doing anything wrong. It's their site/service; they can make any changes they want. It's like developers having to keep up with changes to Android, for example. The UI can change from release to release; new rules get added to the play store; how access to external storage is allowed/handled changes often. Google isn't doing it for the fun of it and it makes no sense to take them to task over it; it's just one of those "keep up" things which has been at the root of software development for as long as I can remember.

Re: My Heroic and Lazy Stand Against IFTTT

#130

Post by michaelmcmillan »

lindentibbets wrote: post #117
swanson wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My hobby: role-playing how I would respond as the CEO if my company was getting skewered on HN. Here is my version! --- I am [not] the CEO over at IFTTT. We messed up. Big time. Pinboard -- and other services developers love -- played an important role in our success thus far and we dropped the ball with the roll-out of our new platform. We have a shared incentive: to make channels work reliably for our end-users. To…

Damn, that is good! I have reached out to Maciej as well.

You do not seem like a very serious CEO.
Post reply on HN