

Show HN: Bipio - For People and Robots - feralmoan
https://bip.io

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csmatt
Looks somewhat similar to IFTTT. Can you comment on what makes your service
different/better and the demographic it's geared toward? It says 'no
programming required', but the blog makes me thing otherwise.

I like the idea, though (even if programming is required). I'm an avid user of
Tasker on Android to automate tasks on my phone and would love to be able to
do that with web services without having to stand up, host, and maintain the
code for doing so. I've also used Yahoo! Pipes, but it leaves a lot to be
desired and still takes a programmer's mindset to use.

Good luck!

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feralmoan
It is a little similar to IFTTT (and Zapier and Elastic.io) but was definitely
more inspired by Yahoo Pipes. The project is many years old via several
pivots, it started out as an email anonymizer > rss transform aggregator when
I was going through a semantic web phase. I'm not sure of Pipes underlying
implementation, but Bipio uses a (distributed) digraph to process
channels/functions with virtually limitless complexity. Others on the market
seemed locked into a simpler functional predicate.

Bipio is geared towards the sweet spot of developer flexibility and non-
developer productivity, so the problem I'm trying to solve is 'how do I give
programmer flexibility to users who don't care (or have need to care) about
programming'. You can get as much under the hood of Bipio as you want, or use
a very highly abstracted UI, which I'm still building, to just get stuff done.
A fundamental difference beyond the open API is the ability to power a web
application, or be an email gatekeeper, or content aggregator etc. or model
very complex pipelines easily. I have someone using it to sell .psd templates
on etsy straight from dropbox, completely hands off, which was a really
interesting use case (and a 30 minute setup all things considered including
testing).

Given enough interest, it will likely progress to an open source model circa
Wordpress, so I can really start concentrating and understanding the human
interaction side of these types of services.

Thanks for the feedback! :)

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csmatt
I appreciate the reply. I put in my email and look forward to trying it out.

