Slashdot Mirror
'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.
Goodwill can be hard to get back. Tread lightly IFTTT.
For the curious, "IFTTT" is an Android app ("If This, Then That") which allows one to make scripts for chaining other app functions together. Of course, it's mostly for noobs because real men use BusyBox to make cron scripts with Android's API.
This acronym is mentioned no less then 12 times in the summary. And yet I still have no fucking clue what it is or what it does.
Perhaps someone here could enlighten me?
> Many don't necessarily want -- or can allow -- IFTTT to do that. . Pinboard, a social bookmarking website, falls in the latter category.
No, Pinboard already has perfectly working IFTTT support. IFTTT want to break this unless Pinboard develop to their custom API and sign a large legal document.
Did Maciej Ceglowski just use an analogy in which his users live in a sewer and his content is the shit he flushes down the drain?
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
You know, reading that, it's hard not to think IFTTT (which I've never heard of) are being the dicks here ... YOU wrote a tool which scrapes content from other sites, and now YOU want THEM to conform to your API, as well as preventing 3rd parties from using your shit? And possibly give YOU rights to THEIR content and retain the right to change the license? Good luck with that.
This sounds like an illegal squatter suing the property owner to upgrade the plumbing and fix the leaky roof.
What, exactly, is IFTTT offering in return other than to say "in order to allow our users to access your site with our stuff, you have to agree to the following". Why would anybody accept random terms and conditions by a third party who merely redistributes your own stuff is a mystery to me.
Sorry, this sounds like a bit of bullshit shakedown, and expecting someone to take steps to support your stuff ... my answer would be to ignore them as well.
Everything about this sounds like childish, petulant and over-reaching behavior in which the 3rd party service is asserting some form of control over the original service so the 3rd party can retain their users. What makes you think the original service owes you a damned thing?
Two words: Fuck that.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Just one question...
What the bloody hell is IFTTT?
Like many of you, I use IFTTT.
I think you've overestimated.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
For those of you geeks who see an abrevation they've never heard of and that is presented as some super high-tech thing that you should know (I know, I've had the same problem):
IFTTT (if this then that) is a commercial web service (free as in beer, but they want all your data, like Google or Facebook) that hooks together a slew of popular other services using API calls and probably a little scraping aswell to automate tasks and data migration using a neat and shiny web-based click-ui. Think Apples Automator on OS X, but for all those shiny Web SaaS thingies hippsters get a hard-on about these days.
The wannabees like to throw around "IFTTT" because it sounds really nerdy, geeky and high-tech and they get all giddy when their Linux admin looks really confused having never heard the word. But don't worry, they just use it to send smilies on facebook whenever they've taken a picture in instagram and stuff like that. Your Perl & Python scripts are just as indespensible as always - so no trouble here.
Glad I could help.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
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.
I immediately clicked on the link mistakenly seeing what I thought was going to be a discussion advocating avoiding inverse fast fourier transforms.
I couldn't agree more, these convoluted summaries are confusing me on a periodic basis. I mean, this whole subject is no less than orthogonal to fast fourier transforms. That CEO they're quoting? He's not even trying to save phase.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Comment removed based on user account deletion