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'My Heroic and Lazy Stand Against IFTTT' (pinboard.in)
Like many of you, I use IFTTT. It's one of the handiest tools on the internet to get your work done. Want a text alert for weather? Want a notification on your Android smartphone whenever someone you follow publishes a blog post? IFTTT can do all sorts of such things. It is able to do so because it works with different companies and utilizes APIs of their services. Many of these companies are happy to have IFTTT trying to enhance the experience of their customers. Many don't necessarily want -- or can allow -- IFTTT to do that. Pinboard, a social bookmarking website, falls in the latter category. Maciej Ceglowski, CEO of Pinboard in a blog post explained why that is the case: Imagine if your sewer pipe started demanding that you make major changes in your diet. Now imagine that it got a lawyer and started asking you to sign things. You would feel surprised. This is the position I find myself in today with IFTTT, a form of Internet plumbing that has been connecting peaceably to my backend for the past five years, but which has recently started sending scary emails. [...] Because many of you rely on IFTTT, and because [their request] makes it sound like I'm the asshole, I feel I should explain myself. In a nutshell: 1. IFTTT wants me to do their job for them for free. 2. They have really squirrely terms of service. In the blog post, Ceglowski further explains his concerns with IFTTT. He says IFTTT wants ownership of all right, title, and interest. "Pinboard is in some ways already a direct competitor to IFTTT. The site offers built-in Twitter integration, analogous to IFTTT's twitter-Pinboard recipe. I don't know what rights I would be assigning here, but this is not the way I want to find out." You should read the blog post, it's very insightful and sheds light on things that many of us might not have considered otherwise. Jason Snell has offered his take on this as well, he writes: If IFTTT sticks with this philosophy, it will rapidly become a lot less useful and interesting as a service.
Not just maintain their service, but agree to terms of service IFTTT is imposing, and write new code for them.
Wait, what? You integrate with my stuff and you want me to agree to YOUR terms of service? Really? And write you code for free? Gee, sounds awesome.
What legal leg to stand on to IFTTT think they have here? This is a land grab, basically with the thinly veiled threat that IFTTT brings value to site owners, and that they should be signing their contract to keep that happening.
Again, this is so much bullshit it isn't even funny.
The people from IFTTT who wrote that shit are utterly delusional, and have apparently lost sight of the fact that they're providing access to someone else's stuff, and that someone else doesn't owe them a damned thing.
Who the hell would sign any rights away to some random asshole who says "since our stuff uses yours stuff you owe us something"?
I'd rewrite my own terms of service that says "if you're a third party accessing our stuff, or writing tools to access our stuff, you owe us 25% of your revenues" and then tell them to pay up or fuck off.
This is a street busker asserting copyright over the songs he sings. I hope nobody has ever actually signed this, because if they have they've essentially been robbed.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
I used IFTTT for all of about twenty seconds. It seemed interesting but once you advance beyond "take this data and send it to Twitter, take that data and send it to Facebook", it becomes useless. I wanted to use my smartphone's built-in abilities more and IFTTT wasn't giving me the capabilities. I found an app called Automate that lets you set up a process flow to do things such as upload to Google Drive or an FTP server, send e-mails, take photos with the camera, etc.
Wisely, the app comes with minimal permissions and you need to enable further permissions as scripts require them. For example, I wrote a script that takes a photo of someone if they don't put in my correct unlock code and e-mails that photo to me. Of course, before this script could work, I needed to grant Automate access to my camera. If I remove the script, I can easily disable the access and keep Automate from accessing the camera in the future. Much more powerful than IFTTT.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.