Anyone else want the phrase "internet of things" to die? I guess it's not rational, but it just bugs me more and more every time it comes up. Too buzz-wordy or something.
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
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 ne…
> Zapier and probably IFTTT's integrations are very shallow and don't allow you to do much automatic processing of data. Given their target market, I see that as their competitive advantage. It's all too easy to appeal to the very technical, and allow them to plugin scripts and filters and whatnot into the pipeline, but by reducing all of that complexity down to "if this, then that" they are much more approachable by…
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Re: With $30M More in Hand, IFTTT Looks to the Internet of Things
#73> While IFTTT’s dream is for all companies to play nicely together via its open platform... A closed-source integration service is not an open platform, and this is especially relevant when it is an integration platform. I am betting (and building something towards the same ends) on more people embracing and promoting open alternatives than at any time before. IFTTT's market is huge. There are millions of programmers…
> There are millions of programmers around the world who'll never write any code outside work, and they vastly outnumber the rest of us. You mean the programmers with healthy work-life balance that have better things to do than waste their free time staring at a text editor? The implication that these "other programmers" are inferior in some way and require IFTTT to integrate services is quite offensive to me.
> waste their free time staring at their text editor
Is this how you see programming?
Something tells me you wouldn't be a very good programmer.
"Why would a sculptor waste their free time hammering rocks?"
Re: With $30M More in Hand, IFTTT Looks to the Internet of Things
#74@Pinboard: "Right now the IFTTT business model is to charge one user $30M, rather than lots of users $2. The challenge will be with recurring payments"
Re: With $30M More in Hand, IFTTT Looks to the Internet of Things
#75And still no webhooks - http://blog.jazzychad.net/2012/08/05/ifttt-needs-webhooks-st...
This one thing would blow up usage by developers across the board.
Re: With $30M More in Hand, IFTTT Looks to the Internet of Things
#76I'd bet $100M on IFTTT if I had it. They've got an amazing ecosystem of often proprietary devices and services feeding event information into them.
v1 is rules by end-users—v10 intelligence by the system.
What if they could take that data and create concepts around the identity of people using those devices, where they are at certain times, what they're doing, etc. etc. Turn all that data around and broker it back to services/devices, making each of the providers that much more powerful but dependent upon IFTTT. It's super-charging the internet of things in a way that perhaps only Google (with Google Now) seems to be thinking.
Re: With $30M More in Hand, IFTTT Looks to the Internet of Things
#77And still no webhooks - http://blog.jazzychad.net/2012/08/05/ifttt-needs-webhooks-st... This one thing would blow up usage by developers across the board.
"There's a big strategic risk in you guys offering web hooks: it facilitates competitors piggybacking on your event detection and building high value response services that compete directly with your own. In other words, you become a piece of costly-to-maintain middleware and others capture the real consumer value." -- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4344335
In other words, something like webhooks hurts the bottom line of this "open platform" (quote from OP.) Maybe IFTTT is only useful because a lot of the services it consumes don't make it easy to do these things, because it would diminish their own value. It's greedy walled gardens all the way down.
Re: With $30M More in Hand, IFTTT Looks to the Internet of Things
#78IFTT and Zapier are two of the most exciting companies to watch in tech right now. Why? Because automation and programming are still inaccessible to most people, but the need and interest is widespread. IFTT and Zapier, both of which I use, are racing for breadth of services they integrate as opposed to depth of a service's API they expose/support. I think that is a mistake. I also believe the first of the two to support industrial devices, a robust security model and open source hardware will run dominate the space. There are only so many Mailchimp, Salesforce, Google Docs integrations of value - but infinite use cases for device integration. On this score perhaps IFTT has a lead. IFTT and Zapier are what, IMHO, Apple's Automator should have been. I think Apple may have missed the mark throwing resources at Swift, when the much larger market is end-user integrations. I might add applications like Tasker and Locale on Android add a ton of value to those platforms, at the expense of the iPhone, and Apple remains largely absent on the integration front.
Re: With $30M More in Hand, IFTTT Looks to the Internet of Things
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
> There are millions of programmers around the world who'll never write any code outside work, and they vastly outnumber the rest of us. You mean the programmers with healthy work-life balance that have better things to do than waste their free time staring at a text editor? The implication that these "other programmers" are inferior in some way and require IFTTT to integrate services is quite offensive to me.
> waste their free time staring at their text editor Is this how you see programming? Something tells me you wouldn't be a very good programmer. "Why would a sculptor waste their free time hammering rocks?"
Programming is really fun and cool. But there are other fun and cool things that are not programming. I'm sure sculptors also take brakes from hammering rocks.
Re: With $30M More in Hand, IFTTT Looks to the Internet of Things
#80IFTTT 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).
Using any computer in any fashion is technically programming that computer.