

Ifttt raises $1.5M Seed Round From Top Investors - wisp
http://techcrunch.com/2012/01/04/ifttt-a-glue-gun-for-sticking-together-your-web-sites-raises-1-5m-seed-round-from-top-investors/

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spindritf
I wish they supported Dropbox by accessing only a single directory, I'm a
little reluctant to give it access to all my files.

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timjahn
I'd venture to guess fine points like this will be tweaked over time. I don't
want them storing my Wordpress admin credentials either, so I haven't
activated that channel yet.

(I actually emailed them about this and am awaiting a response).

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parfe
Great looking service with some deal breakers:

Needs Access to my entire dropbox account

Requests access to "Gmail" (I have no idea how much access that provides). Why
can't it just set the To: Address on an outgoing email? Ifttt has been sending
me emails no problem so far. The Gmail permission crosses a line. It doesn't
help that Google doesn't explain what access I would grant.

Seems they took the easier path and just defaulted to full permissions. I'm
sure enough people don't mind that it was the right decision. Just a personal
deal breaker.

Also the Recipe filter needs a quick way to specify "Only my active channels."
Or/also, my dashboard reads "8 Channels with 264 possible task combinations. "
Why isn't this a link to existing recipes filtered by my active channels?

Ifttt provides no method for deleting your ifttt account or purging your
external information.

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toomuchtodo
Other side of the coin:

Need my Dropbox access? Sure, here you go. Need my Gmail access, meh, why not?

I'm not horribly concerned with allowing them the access I've granted to
Facebook, Twitter, Gmail, Dropbox, and Evernote.

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parfe
Yeah, I had no problem with the other junk.

But a "Whoops, we accidentally deleted all your stuff" in dropbox or gmail
would be a tad devastating.

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dgurney
Wow, can 3rd-party services actually delete all your data if they wanted to?
It's not just read-only access?

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parfe
I have no idea!

The permissions page at Dropbox says:

The app ifttt would like to connect with your Dropbox.

    
    
        This app will have access to your entire Dropbox.
        Please make sure you trust this app before proceeding.
        You're currently logged in as user@example.org. If you meant to connect from another account, you can logout.
    

Doesn't define what "access" might entail. If the permissions allow
create/upload I have to assume it includes delete as well.

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hopeless
Ifttt is an extremely well-designed and useful service. I look forward to the
day they get a business model so I can rely on it

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timjahn
That's a really good point. A service like this has enough potential business
use cases where I'm sure a lot of users would be willing to directly give them
cash to ensure this is a long term company, not a flash in the pan startup.

Makes you think about the true intentions behind a startup/company.

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seltzered_
I'll pay someone 10-30 bucks if they recreate ifttt with a pinboard model.
Keep it simple stupid, fairly cheap, and charge extra if you want to do things
like SMS/Voice/things that require constant notification.

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herbivore
What do you mean by pinboard model?

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nuttendorfer
You pay once to sign up, this fee increases with the ammount of users.

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seltzered_
yep. pinboard has both a "pay us one-time" model for bookmarking and an
"annual-fee" model for special features like pdf archives.

That seems reasonable and fair, then again I'm sure he can pull it off well
because as far as i know pinboard's a one-man bootstrapped company.

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ryanmolden
I agree, great service. I use it to monitor posts to the support forum for the
product I work on. People at work think I am constantly monitoring the forums
to respond so quickly for questions I can answer, but no, I just follow links
from SMS messages that ifttt sends to me.

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perfunctory
What would be their business model?

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timjahn
Charge to use it?

::GASPPPPPPP::

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toomuchtodo
And have it easily replaced by whomever will run it cheaper. What does
Instapaper cost? $1/month?

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timjahn
There are plenty of examples (Apple being the first one that comes to mind) of
companies who charge a ton (and make a ton of money) for a product that is
available elsewhere for cheaper.

Price isn't always everything in the consumers mind.

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toomuchtodo
What Apple charges for, and what developers/engineers will pay for, are
drastically different.

How many people have downloaded Angry Birds vs how many people have paid for
Tasker on the Android platform?

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timjahn
I just signed up and starting exploring Ifttt, and WOW. This is EXTREMELY
useful and practical (at least for me). My kind of site/app.

A few uses off the top of my head:

\- When searching for a new apartment or house and using Craigslist as one of
your sources, use Ifttt to get a text/email when a new, relevant Craigslist
post appears matching your search criteria

\- Automatically add a new Wordpress blog post to Buffer when published

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leak
I was going to make fun of the name but then decided to try it and same exact
reaction. It's so damn awesome and easy to use. I think this is something I'd
even consider paying for. Nice work Ifttt team!

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timjahn
If they continue expanding the channels, triggers, and actions available, I'd
probably come up with more business uses and would pay for it.

(Off the top of my head, some MailChimp and Eventbrite integration would be
nice.)

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brandnewlow
Or advertising... (Hi, Tim!)

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conesus
This is an awesome service. I reached out trying to get a channel for
NewsBlur, since Google Reader is there, but they said that there's an API
coming and I should just wait for that. Kind of unfortunate since this is one
of those services that--while brand new--a number of my users have asked for.

I bet it's a good feeling when users of other services are banging on the door
asking for integration with ifttt.

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joshu
Why didn't you ask Linden when he was in the office?

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conesus
I was on the phone and he only had a minute, so what would've have been a
perfect alignment of planets turned into a near miss.

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linden
Happy to chat further, but would love to focus the next year on building
something others can hook into to get their own channels out there.

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conesus
Just emailed you. I think NewsBlur would be a valuable enough immediate
addition that it would be worthwhile. I know I have plenty of demand on my
side.

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vigilanteweb
This service is great. I'm really excited to see it grow. Congrats on the
funding. It would be great to be able to login to multiple accounts of the
same service. Might already be a feature, but I wasn't able to get that set
up. Sent a support email. Hopefully that can be added. Really pumped about
where this will go.

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linden
Multiple accounts per channel is something we'd like to add. Not possible at
the moment. Glad you dig it!

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ihaveyourbuns
Is this Yahoo Pipes 2.0?

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timjahn
I'm a pretty technical guy, developer, etc. After reading your comment, I
popped on over to Yahoo Pipes, having never really used it.

I didn't 100% understand what you could do with Pipes based on the first page.
I still don't. Is it just for RSS and blogs?

I took one look at the Ifttt page and instantly understood what it could do
for me.

Big difference in my eyes.

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jc4p
The first two times I saw Ifttt on HackerNews I went to their website and just
thought it was a mantra of how to share information on the web. I thought they
were just telling me that I should use Dropbox to upload files from my phone
and then upload them to Facebook when I get home.

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sawyer
Very interesting idea I hadn't heard of yet; does anyone know how they deal
with services that do not have APIs conducive to this type of application? Or
are all of the recipes pre-constructed by the IFTTT team to be sure the data
in/data out constitutes a valid use of the service APIs in question?

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sathyabhat
There are some existing recipes, however - you as a user aren't restricted by
those recipes. You're free to create any recipe with almost any API supported
by IFTTT as long as there are valid trigger points.

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kmfrk
It's also worth mentioning that your tasks apparently can get turned off. It
happened to me when I had a Twitter account tied to an RSS feed where no
updates were posted in a couple of days. Bam, task automatically shut down.

It seemed a bit weird and was completely unexpected, so I probably wouldn't
rely _too_ much on it initially, until you have used it for a while.

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linden
Sorry to hear your task got turned off. You should have gotten a notice via
email about it. We monitor tasks that have trouble running (in this case
perhaps the feed was down?) and always make sure to ping the task owners about
it when we turn them off.

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kmfrk
I got the e-mail, but the only take-away I got from it was _sad trombone_.

From what you're saying, you did it as a service to me, the user, and not to
yourselves to save resources, which is what the e-mail notification sounds
like - which annoyed me a bit, I have to admit.

I'll give it a second shot and send you an e-mail when or if it happens again.
:)

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linden
Ok sounds good. Perhaps we need to revisit the tone in that email, it IS
intended as a service to you. If something isn't working as expected we wanted
to make sure you knew about it. Its on us to make sure to get you more precise
information about what is going wrong. Thanks for the feedback!

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WadeF
Big time congrats to Linden and his team. Ifttt is a really good tool with
lot's of potential.

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krashidov
I think dropbox would benefit greatly from acquiring Ifttt. Think about it, It
seems to align with the whole filesystem of the internet thing incredibly. I
have files on widgetA, whenever somebody shares files on widgetA with me, push
it to my dropbox.

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kellysutton
It's a real bummer to see perfectly capable companies with enough traction
taking funding.

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herval
Why? Maybe they just need some cash to actually draw a basic salary (you know,
to pay the bills)... Or maybe they need more resources to build even better
things.

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bryanh
Congrats Linden! Integrations have massive potential, and ifttt is paving the
way.

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Jun8
Ifttt is awesome! I was wondering if there is a similar app for mobile devices
that I can create rules like "if I am at home (judging by WiFi) then ..." or
"if the battery falls below 20% then turn off BT"?

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StavrosK
Tasker does this: <http://tasker.dinglisch.net/>

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Karunamon
+1 for Tasker.

And to Locale above, Tasker actually has support for Locale. The things you
can do with those two apps combined is absurdly awesome.

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StavrosK
Have you noticed any significant battery drain? I'm not using either because
of my already short battery life.

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Karunamon
Locale sucks battery quite a bit simply because it's a location tracking app,
with all of the consumption that entails. It works for me though because my
phone, if not attached to me, is charging on my desk at home or at work.

Tasker much less so.

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ddw
Can some of that money goes towards building an API for Daytum.com? :)

Anyway, glad to see that this service will grow, it's really useful.

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creativityhurts
Yes! They're on it, it's awesome. I'm looking forward for Path to have a
public API, that will be the stuff. Have you guys notice the ~12h delay in
which Path posts to Facebook or Twitter?

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joshu
Congrats! (I participated in the round)

