201–210 of 223 posts
So not only are they trying to get people to do IFTTT's work for them, they're trying to get people to pay for the privilege of doing IFTTT's work for them. I'm, er, impressed.
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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
Or my favourite: http://idlewords.com/2007/04/the_alameda_weehawken_burrito_t...
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…
Your work should stay yours, and as current as you choose. You will have to deal with the initial npm politics, but that's better than the IFTTT contract presented...
It seems like more and more companies' business model simply involves setting up a "toll booth" on the internet.
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…
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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…
> 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? No. Because the situations are different. Here, Pinboard did essentially nothing to get IFTTT to work the first time. IFTTT wrote the integration code, and has been maintaining it. They're now trying to push that effort onto other people. i.e. They're…
It's as if you've gotten a lot of business to your small coffee shop because I've chosen to shuttle potential customers to and back from your shop. If one day I tell you I'm going to stop doing this, but you're welcome to pick up the slack, am I truly being unreasonable?
I think its an interesting train-wreck to take note of. And it is clearly a reflection of the CEO, who has consistently misunderstood or ignored the true complaints people have about this new direction, while half-apologizing for terms and blaming "communication" on terms that place absurd expectations on companies that IFTTT chose to integrate with, and now wants to reverse the roles of.
Meanwhile, maciej is doing everything right. Communicating with his users about what is actually going on (instead of lying to them as IFTTT has done), and doing so in a thoughtful and playful piece of writing.
Time will tell how this plays out. But I think if IFTTT's moral compass is willing to let this go public, if they think this is/was an actual good idea, their days are numbered. The PR around this change alone was horribly executed, in addition to the change itself being a big middle finger. Neither speaks to an understanding of their users or sites they depend on to integrate with.
IFTTT would be NOTHING without any other services to integrate with, and they chose to throw them under the bus.
You had a chance, IFTTT. But you revealed your colors, and now you don't.
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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 whate…