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With $30M More in Hand, IFTTT Looks to the Internet of Things

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Re: With $30M More in Hand, IFTTT Looks to the Internet of Things

#11

Post by namityadav »

IFTTT is at a great spot to bring simple programming & logic to non-programmers who just want to customize how they interact with technology just a little bit. Looks like Yahoo Pipes missed a big opportunity there.

However, the IFTTT homepage and WTF page are still too complicated for a casual visitor. The WTF page throws all these terms like Channels, Triggers, Actions, Ingredients, Recipes, etc instead of focusing on telling the visitor what they can do with IFTTT. The name (If This Then That) is amazing for explaining what IFTTT is. But, beyond that, they seem to be making things look more complicated than they need to be.

Re: With $30M More in Hand, IFTTT Looks to the Internet of Things

#14

Post by brettcvz »

namityadav wrote: post #11

IFTTT is at a great spot to bring simple programming & logic to non-programmers who just want to customize how they interact with technology just a little bit. Looks like Yahoo Pipes missed a big opportunity there. However, the IFTTT homepage and WTF page are still too complicated for a casual visitor. The WTF page throws all these terms like Channels, Triggers, Actions, Ingredients, Recipes, etc instead of focusing…

We're exploring some new ways to communicate this, would you be interested in providing feedback? Let me know at brettcvz at IFTTT dot com

Re: With $30M More in Hand, IFTTT Looks to the Internet of Things

#15

Post by lazerwalker »

carsonreinke wrote: post #13

Too bad they don't open their platform up without requiring official partnership.

This exactly. I understand why they haven't done it, but the number of things I'd love to build as a hobbyist if only I could get a REST endpoint to trigger or enter a webhook URL to receive actions...

Re: With $30M More in Hand, IFTTT Looks to the Internet of Things

#16

Post by bellerocky »

kenrose wrote: post #7

Was going to ask how IFTTT differs from Zapier, then found the following article somewhat useful: http://blog.matt.thomm.es/post/63394262428/zapier-versus-if-... In case others had the same question.

The Zapier founder's primary talent seems to be self-promotion (and they built a cool thing too). They've managed to land guest articles on Techcrunch, I heard they ask other new founders to mention Zapier on YC demo days, I have seem them exploit rivalry among competitors to get them all signed up (X is on Zapier, maybe you should be too), and they've put a lot into the SEO optimization of their pages, generating nearly unique landing pages for every possible combination of the services they offer. This is not criticism, this is praise. I'm kind of in awe.

I've never tried IFTTT, but I have used Zapier and the service is pretty good. My take is that engineers can set up scripts that can connect APIs themselves, which has benefits and drawbacks. Like it takes time to build a script that does this, and you have to keep it up to date as those APIs change, but on the other hand Zapier and probably IFTTT's integrations are very shallow and don't allow you to do much automatic processing of data.

Re: With $30M More in Hand, IFTTT Looks to the Internet of Things

#17

Post by kevinebaugh »

lazerwalker wrote: post #15
carsonreinke wrote: post #13

Too bad they don't open their platform up without requiring official partnership.

This exactly. I understand why they haven't done it, but the number of things I'd love to build as a hobbyist if only I could get a REST endpoint to trigger or enter a webhook URL to receive actions...

We're building a way for others to build and take ownership of their Channels: https://ifttt.com/platform Hobby or personal Channels are an interesting idea!

Re: With $30M More in Hand, IFTTT Looks to the Internet of Things

#18

Post by jliptzin »

ericHosick wrote: post #8
idlewords wrote: post #6

IFTTT strikes me as the canonical example of a useful, small project that people would pay for that instead got stars in its eyes. For the moment, it's a great example of venture capitalists subsidizing a useful adapter cable for Internet services. But I get nervous when infrastructure gets delusions of grandeur. If 'cron' suddenly acquired a staff of 40, I would start looking for alternatives.

> If 'cron' suddenly acquired a staff of 40, I would start looking for alternatives. How accessible is Cron to people? For the consumer, almost all aspects of computing are becoming ubiquitous: except programming. Tools like those provided by IFTTT are enabling people to do more with their devices. Someday, programming will also be ubiquitous (it probably won't even be called programming anymore).

Maybe everyone will know how to do very basic programming, but there will still be professional programmers. We all know how to plug appliances into electric sockets and work with extension cords, but you still need to call an electrician when you need something more complex or to do a repair.

Re: With $30M More in Hand, IFTTT Looks to the Internet of Things

#19

Post by jggonz »

ericHosick wrote: post #8
idlewords wrote: post #6

IFTTT strikes me as the canonical example of a useful, small project that people would pay for that instead got stars in its eyes. For the moment, it's a great example of venture capitalists subsidizing a useful adapter cable for Internet services. But I get nervous when infrastructure gets delusions of grandeur. If 'cron' suddenly acquired a staff of 40, I would start looking for alternatives.

> If 'cron' suddenly acquired a staff of 40, I would start looking for alternatives. How accessible is Cron to people? For the consumer, almost all aspects of computing are becoming ubiquitous: except programming. Tools like those provided by IFTTT are enabling people to do more with their devices. Someday, programming will also be ubiquitous (it probably won't even be called programming anymore).

> How accessible is Cron to people?

This is an excellent point. Cron has to be one of the most difficult pieces of software to use, and it shouldn't be. When I first heard of IFTTT, I thought it was a joke. I thought: "Who needs these services when I can just spin up a VPS somewhere, write a couple of scripts and get the data I want where I need it"... How silly of me. I don't think my mother would like to take VPS Setup 101, Scripting 101 and Sysadmin 101 in order to have recipes from one website show up in her mailbox every morning.

IFTTT and similar products helps productive people build bridges between services they use in order to further improve their productivity. No need to pay for a VPS, manage it, develop API interfaces, etc... It all makes sense... and if they're able to bring that simplicity to event handling in small devices, then that would be great.

Re: With $30M More in Hand, IFTTT Looks to the Internet of Things

#20

Post by grinich »

idlewords wrote: post #6

IFTTT strikes me as the canonical example of a useful, small project that people would pay for that instead got stars in its eyes. For the moment, it's a great example of venture capitalists subsidizing a useful adapter cable for Internet services. But I get nervous when infrastructure gets delusions of grandeur. If 'cron' suddenly acquired a staff of 40, I would start looking for alternatives.

You could say the same about rsync/ftp and Dropbox, but they seem to be doing fine.
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