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My Heroic and Lazy Stand Against IFTTT

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Re: My Heroic and Lazy Stand Against IFTTT

#181

Post by WCityMike »

idlewords wrote: post #138
bambax wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Actually, all I want is for existing IFTTT recipes that use Pinboard not to break. I am fine with IFTTT discontinuing support for my site because of our diverging views on whether a service like IFTTT should be a platform or a roll of duct tape, but the stuff people have duct-taped together should stay duct-taped together.

In case it's not immediately clear, this is Maciej from Pinboard. Note the handle is the same as his blog's name.

Re: My Heroic and Lazy Stand Against IFTTT

#182

Post by gorillaffe »

lindentibbets wrote: post #120
erichocean wrote: post #33

It would be easier to support IFTTT on this if the proposed APIs to be implemented were public. But making the APIs private and then being a dick about it with all the legal threats isn't something that I can reasonably support. I doubt I'm alone in thinking this way.

We fully intend to make the APIs public, but are working with existing partners to implement. We are trying to be flexible and understanding, also are not throwing legal threats :)

I don't understand. How are existing partners holding up the publication of your API specifications?

Re: My Heroic and Lazy Stand Against IFTTT

#183

Post by maxerickson »

rtpg wrote: post #125
timv wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Microsoft spent several decades devoting lots of resources to not breaking old software. Obscene things like sniffing binary names to support weird legacy behaviors. They did this because users don't like disruptions, especially when they are (or just seem) arbitrary.

Maybe IFTTT has good reasons for turning off the working integration. I haven't seen where they list them.

Re: My Heroic and Lazy Stand Against IFTTT

#184

Post by mrgoldenbrown »

dave2000 wrote: post #129
cissou wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Keeping up with something you chose to support (like if you wrote an Android app) is reasonable. But that is the opposite of what happened here. IFTTT chose to support pinboard, not the other way around. If they are choosing to stop support, they need to own up to it, not put the blame on IFTTT.

Re: My Heroic and Lazy Stand Against IFTTT

#185

Post by bmm6o »

lindentibbets wrote: post #80
ReadingInBed wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having spent countless hours working with third party apis that are poorly documented and business critical I can understand how unexpected changes can be frustrating. But asking people to do things your way with no incentive is even more frustrating for everyone. It comes off as you not respecting their time or the product and apis they have already built.

We very much respect Pinboard's time and are willing to give them just about as much of it as they need. Am willing to spend our time as well! We are looking to improve all of these integrations over time, beyond what their API can support and the best way for Pinboard to do this is to own that integration completely.

> We very much respect Pinboard's time and are willing to give them just about as much of it as they need

Demanding someone make changes and then offering them as much time as they need is missing the point. It's not the deadline that's offensive, it's the request for free work that you benefit from.

Re: My Heroic and Lazy Stand Against IFTTT

#186

Post by coryfklein »

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…

> Any developer signing this agreement is nuts.

... or didn't read the TOS more likely.

Re: My Heroic and Lazy Stand Against IFTTT

#187

Post by danielweber »

timv wrote: post #70
gexla wrote: post #66

Isn't much of the legal stuff just a way to cover their tails? For example, the bit about owning content. Do they really want your content? Is content on the internet worth anything these days? If your content is worth something, it's likely the Google ranking which gives it value rather than the content itself. I imagine that's just an attempt to keep people from suing over reproducing content to go over the pipes.…

> Isn't much of the legal stuff just a way to cover their tails? Sure, but most of it puts your tail on the line instead. They've decided that they somehow have enough power to make you do their job, and make sure you do it in a way that protects their legal interests over yours. You'd be a fool to agree to it. > Do they really want your content? Yes. Their lawyer told them that it was a good idea to make sure their…

There are lawyers who write contracts that the other side will agree with.

Then there are lawyers who write contracts to see what the other side will stupidly agree to. (And bill additional hours for all the rewrite they need to do.)

You can choose either kind of lawyer for your business, but be aware that the people with whom you do business will judge you for it.

Re: My Heroic and Lazy Stand Against IFTTT

#188

Post by msbarnett »

dave2000 wrote: post #129
cissou wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I think you've really missed the point here.

Nobody is arguing that IFTTT can't change their service as they see fit. They can, as they've chosen to here, move from a model in which they write client code for other sites APIs, to a model where other sites write client code for their API. It's obviously beneficial to IFTTT if they can offload this work to other sites for free.

What's shitty and rude and presumptuous about their behaviour is going to other sites who never asked to be part of IFTTT (IFTTT was just a consumer of pinboard's public API) and saying "here sign this and get cracking on implementing our specs".

And when a site owner refuses such a "request", IFTTT is basically lying to its customers when it says that Pinboard has chosen to leave the service, rather than "IFTTT has chosen to shut down their working pinboard API client code".

To reuse your analogy, it's as though Google themselves built an App client for my site, then decided to move to a model where Android apps were responsible for hosting and bandwidth of their own app (their right) and disable all apps in the store who didn't specify a hosting location (their right), deleted the app they built (their right), mailed me the specs for their app and a deadline to reimplement it myself and host it at my cost (why would I be interested in this? I never asked for any of this), and then when I told them to get bent emailed customers "Sadly, beloved app $APP has chosen to take themselves out of the Android store" (lying).

Re: My Heroic and Lazy Stand Against IFTTT

#189

Post by zeveb »

hkmurakami wrote: post #144
klenwell wrote: post #23

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 expla…

Maciej is a fabulous writer with a deft mix of wry, self-deprecating wit and precise expressions. If you aren't familiar with his writing, you'd likely enjoy "Dabblers and Blowhards" http://www.idlewords.com/2005/04/dabblers_and_blowhards.htm

This one is just gut-wrenching to read: http://idlewords.com/2012/09/no_evidence_of_disease.htm

And this, of course, is a modern classic: http://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm

Re: My Heroic and Lazy Stand Against IFTTT

#190

Post by kefka »

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'm a mere user of IFTTT. And the more I read this train-wreck of a thread, along with what you're putting developers through, I'm done.

All of my further work will be done purely with local instances of Node-Red and Apache NiFi. It may not support everything IFTTT does (and I know that), but what I will have will just work.

And in all honesty, all "* as a Service" companies give me the heebie-jeebies, because I know you (collectively) can do the stunts shown here.

Edit: account deleted on IFTTT as well. The less I am a serf on anothers' system and the master on my own (Node-Red), the better. Enough of lock-me-in closed APIs.

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