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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.
I mainly use IFTTT in concert with my Hue lighting (which is all through my house). Here are my main observations:
1. It is _really_ slow. Like terribly slow. I have a Recipe on there to change the color of my lights when my favorite football team starts a game... it usually changes the lights sometime during the second quarter! Useless
2. The fact that there is only one "if" clause damns it into being just a "toy". For instance, it can turn my lights on and off as I come and go from my house. Awesome, right? NO. It doesn't take into account that _other_ people live in the house! There is no way to say "if I come home and no one else is there turn on the lights". This leads to situations like me getting back from hanging out with my friends at 1AM and IFTTT happily blasting all the lights in our house while my wife is trying to sleep!
IFTTT is a toy. It's a poor toy at that.