
If this then that - armandososa
http://ifttt.com/wtf
======
gxs
This is the type of service that really brings the benefit of computing to the
masses. Sure, everyone consumes on the internet, but something like this lets
everyone experience the joy programmers feel when they make a computer do what
they want.

~~~
linden
Much appreciated. As programmers ourselves it's the exact feeling we were
looking to introduce to a wider audience.

------
mcritz
I've been using ifttt to:

* Scour Craigslist for an apartment in San Francisco

* Put indeed.com job searches for "UI Design San Francisco" into Evernote

* Monitor airline fares for the cheapest time to buy a one-way ticket from BOS to SFO

* Text me when the temperature in zip code 94103 rises above 68 to remind myself to get out and enjoy my new city.

THANKS IFTTT! I couldn't have done it without you!

~~~
taybenlor
FYI adioso.com (YC W09) does airline price notifications :)

~~~
jh3
Once adioso covers more airlines it will be useful.

------
skymt
A tip for Kindle owners: you can make an ifttt pipeline that sends RSS entries
to Instapaper. Then on Instapaper's end, set up automated Kindle delivery.
Presto, new posts from your favorite bloggers are now on your Kindle, entirely
automatically.

~~~
robert-boehnke
Marco explicitly asks you not to use the send to Kindle feature 'to automate
delivery of bulk content, such as entire feeds.'

See <http://www.instapaper.com/user/kindle>

~~~
gaius
That just takes me to the Instapaper homepage.

~~~
robert-boehnke
whoops, my bad, guess you have to be logged in, here's the full quote

    
    
        Want delivery of full RSS feeds?
    
        Please do not use this feature to automate delivery of bulk content, such as entire feeds.
    
        If you'd like to do that, try Kindlefeeder, a service designed for (and much better for) that purpose.

------
ColinWright
Anyone interested in this may care to read the discussion from 3 months ago:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2604921>

To be honest, I still have a hard time figuring out how, where or why I would
ever use this. Maybe I'm just too old, too disconnected, or too stupid to
understand what it's all about, but in short, I just don't.

I'd love a single, simple, concrete example of a relevant problem this solves.

Don't get me wrong, I have no doubt it's very cool and very clever. I just
really don't get it.

~~~
ColinWright
This is a straight-forward moan about how HN is going to hell in a handcart.
If you don't care about the HN community, or you object to meta, stop reading.

Still here? OK.

When I make a comment on HN I'm about anal about seeing the response it gets.
I care about whether things are perceived to be useful. I want to be useful,
and helpful, and generally make things better. Really, I do.

I take time to give feedback, and look at the articles before voting on them,
and I upvote people who I think are doing good things.

So I noticed that the parent comment to this got a couple of upvotes, and then
got a downvote.

Why did it get a downvote? That's something I really don't get. I asked a
genuine, pointed and specific question about the service. I asked for a
specific improvement to the information being given. I provided a clear
example of someone who doesn't get it, so the service providers can make a
decision about answering my questions, improving the site so the question
doesn't arise, or ignoring me as being in the tail and not worth worrying
about. That would be a business decision that I would respect - I'm often the
customer that gets ignored, because I'm not normal.

So why the downvote?

I don't care about the karma, except in so far as it's an indication of the
cohesion of the "community". What's becoming clear to me is that there really
is no longer a proper community here on HN.

It was a comfortable village - it's now an impersonal city.

Whether the quality is going up or down, or whether the general atmosphere is
becoming more snarky or not, these are side effects.

The community is gone, and HN is something else.

And that's a shame.

~~~
Lewisham
Does it really matter? There are people on the Internet. People disagree with
each other. Someone disagreed with you. Maybe they were just downvoting
everything for fun. Who knows? Who cares?

Because you got a downvote, you make a statement that HN is going to hell.
Honestly, I do not know how much more of an overreaction you could have
crafted here.

~~~
ColinWright

      > People disagree with each other
    

Yes, and once upon a time people here on HN used either to respect that
disagreement, or would discuss it. They used not to downvote for simple
disagreement. That's part of the change.

    
    
      > Maybe they were just downvoting everything for fun.
    

Which again makes my point - you can do that in a city and get away with it,
you can't do it in a village.

    
    
      > Because you got a downvote, you make a statement
      > that HN is going to hell.
    

Do you really think I've said this on the basis of a single downvote? It's a
trend I'm seeing.

Sadly the boiled frog allegory is a myth, but using the analogy anyway, I
think I can see the temperature rising here on HN, and it's respect, quality
discussion and value that's being boiled out. I might easily be wrong and I
might jut be remembering with advantages how HN was 2 and 3 years ago, but if
I'm right, now's the time to start looking for a new place to have thought-
provoking conversation with intelligent and knowledgeable people.

~~~
mquander
I wish we would leave the angry off-topic meta rants for the (frequent) meta
threads. I don't think that the occasion of a single downvote requires a big
immediate derail. I would personally find that to be a small improvement to
what quality discussion and value is present here.

~~~
ColinWright
"All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing"

\-- Edmund Burke (disputed - see
<http://tartarus.org/~martin/essays/burkequote.html> and
<http://tartarus.org/~martin/essays/burkequote2.html> for in-depth discussion)

Even PG is concerned that HN is declining -
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2403696> \- so it's not just me.

But clearly concern for the community is irrelevant and regarded as off-topic,
so I'll stop now.

~~~
Robin_Message
I mean no disrespect and don't wish to rag on you unfairly, especially as your
top-level post made a valid point and had a helpful link to prior discussion.
You are obviously a long-term user and contributor, and often provide useful
links to past discussion, which is very helpful.

So, the downvotes: your original comment could have been interpreted as
sarcastic, which might be why it was downvoted. Worth noting that overall it
was positively received, who knows, maybe someone just slipped on their
iPhone?

Your other comments have two problems. Your tone is somewhat passive-
aggressive, for example:

"triumph of evil [that is, comment quality may be getting worse]", "clearly
concern for the community is irrelevant", "community is gone, and HN is
something else", "respect, quality discussion and value that's being boiled
out"

Coupled this with the unfortunate fact that I (and presumably other people)
also recognise your username for often complaining that HN is getting worse.

That is probably why your meta posts are getting downvoted: you have made your
point before, and unless you have something new to say, that makes it noise
and the community norms are to downvote noise.

~~~
ColinWright
Thank you for your considered and informative reply.

I composed a much longer reply, but it's probably jsut going to be regarded as
noise, so I'll leave it at that.

------
mef
I've been using this for a few months now, and though my usage is probably
atypical, here's what I use it for:

\- as I abandoned RSS readers a long time ago, new posts on my _very favorite_
(read: top 5) blogs send me a notification email with a link to the post

\- new tweets by my _very favorite_ (read: top 3) twitter accounts get SMS'd
to me

Pretty limited usage so far I'll admit, but I'm excited to see what new inputs
and outputs they come up with in the future.

~~~
skymt
Question: why use ifttt rather than Twitter's SMS support?

~~~
mef
I've found Twitter SMS notifications to have spotty performance to my Canadian
numbers.

------
sbierwagen

      <div id='title'>
      <h1><a class='logo_box_nerd_shit' href='/' title='Dashboard'>
      <div id='even_nerdier_shit'></div>
      </a>About ifttt
    

Heh.

Also, when did chrome stop antialiasing text? If I somehow checked a box
labeled "make text look worse", then someone please enlighten me.
<http://bbot.org/etc/aliasing.png>

EDIT: Ha ha, Windows, you card, always with the case-insensitive file systems.
Got me again! Link should work now.

~~~
cpeterso
The text is aliased on my Windows Firefox and Chrome, but not my Linux
Firefox. The font is Helvetica, which is apparently rendered quite poorly on
Windows.

~~~
blasdel
That's it — Windows comes with a crappy bitmap Helvetica, and most Linux
distributions are even worse because X includes an abysmally bad tiny raster
one. Macs ship with a good one, and Adobe Creative Suite installers usually
bundle one which is how lots of designers never notice the problem on Windows.

Basically, you should _never_ specify 'Helvetica' anywhere in a font
declaration. Specify 'Helvetica Neue', the pretty close 'Microsoft Sans
Serif', or _gasp_ Arial — it's not actually worse in any way, despite all the
wankery.

~~~
artursapek
Word, I usually use Arial over Helvetica just to separate myself from all
those hipsters raving about it on tumblr.

------
jtwb
Using (input channel, output channel, title) to summarize Recipes makes code
search a breeze.

Traditionally, code search is done via fulltext indexing of verbose textual
function descriptions. ifttt succeeds in using a channel-signature model, not
unlike Hoogle's type-signature search, to provide code search without asking
authors to write any description at all. Very nice!

[http://www.haskell.org/hoogle/?hoogle=%28a+-%3E+b%29+-%3E+a+...](http://www.haskell.org/hoogle/?hoogle=%28a+-%3E+b%29+-%3E+a+-%3E+b)

------
revorad
The original blog post explaining how they came up with the idea is very
interesting - <http://blog.ifttt.com/post/2316021241/ifttt-the-beginning>

------
colanderman
Why does the "about" URL reference profanity?

Why did the page's source contain profanity, as pointed out by another poster
(<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2971423>)? (The profanity has since been
removed.)

If your target audience is non-programmers, then make the URL something I can
e-mail my mom without having to answer awkward questions.

~~~
mcantor

      Mom: What does "WTF" mean?
      You: It's just some internet joke.
      Mom: Well, all right.
    

Fortunately this is how it goes for me:

    
    
      Mom: What does "WTF" mean?
      Me: It's an internet thing; it stands for "What The Fuck".
      Mom: Ha ha!  I love it.  I'll have to remember that one.

------
shasta
Not to accuse anyone of astroturfing, but the comments on this link read like
what you'd hear on a late night infomercial.

~~~
mef
I assume "astroturfing" refers to some sort of disingenuous testimonial, but I
really do love the service. Not only does it appeal to me as a web developer,
but I've shown it to my not-as-savvy friends and family, and they understand
what it does and what it's good for almost immediately.

------
djtumolo
I use it to fetch my starred links in twitter over to instapaper. On my walk
to the subway, I plow through a bunch of twitter, star what I like, and read
the links underground.

------
Finbarr
Really like this - huge range of possible applications.

One question though: what, if anything, does ifttt do to detect/prevent
infinite loops? If I create a task to copy new photos added to flickr to
instragram, and another task to copy new photos added to instagram to flickr,
what happens?

~~~
linden
Hi, obviously infinite loops will become an issue we will have to deal with as
the service grows. Especially if we start running tasks at a much faster clip
and not just every 15 minutes.

~~~
Finbarr
It's probably not too hard to solve the problem. You could create a directed
graph where the nodes are triggers and the edges are actions and make sure
there are no cycles created whenever a user turns on or creates a task.

Caveats to the above are that you'd need to make sure that accounts in the
channels are tied to single users (or join together the graphs of multiple
users where they share channel accounts). You'd also need to handle odd edge
cases with trigger fields and addins - such as a user @mentioning themselves
and triggering an action to reply to the user who mentioned them.

~~~
marshray
Or if there were a way to leave the site and come back again - say a similar
service starts up with any compatible inverse pair of inputs and outputs.

I have to admit, I look at stuff like this and my first reaction is "hmm, what
could possibly go wrong... could we somehow use this to calculate prime
numbers perhaps?"

------
nexneo
Yahoo pipes renamed and working this time.

------
wgx
I've been using this for about 6 months in beta and I really like it - I wrote
a mini-review on my blog back in March: <http://willgrant.org/if-this-then-
that/>

------
JayNeely
Well-explained service.

<http://tarpipe.com/> is a similar tool that's been around for a while; I
think the HN crowd will like the fine-grain detail of it more.

And it works with a much larger number of services.

------
peteysd
This is one of those "why didn't I think of that?" ideas that will probably
become huge. Nicely done!

------
chetan51
Wow, I was thinking of making an entire app for this, but it's just a simple
recipe in ifttt!

<http://ifttt.com/recipes/75>

------
jmjerlecki
I personally like the large font. It caught my eye right away. I can
understand the "legally blind" comments, but I think its unique.

------
cgranier
I'm using IFTTT to automate a couple of things in my information workflow:

1\. To allow me to feed interesting articles from my iPad into BufferApp so I
can post them automatically to Twitter throughout the day:

[http://red66.com/2011/06/integrating-buffer-into-your-
ipad-t...](http://red66.com/2011/06/integrating-buffer-into-your-ipad-twitter-
workflow/)

I go through Zite, Flipboard and Hacker News every morning and queue up all
the interesting articles. Buffer posts them for me at set times throughout the
day. I don't have to be at my computer to tweet and I don't flood my followers
early in the morning.

2\. To automatically post my Instagram photos to my Google+ account:

[https://plus.google.com/114204703228150089266/posts/9zPZQaN2...](https://plus.google.com/114204703228150089266/posts/9zPZQaN28PH)

\--

------
MartinCron
Brilliant. It reminds me of MIT's Scratch language, only for useful stuff
instead of moving around cartoon cats.

Specifically: the way the UI swipes things away when you make selections feels
very fresh. I might grow to hate it, but I enjoy it today.

------
jackie_singh
Impressed! The only issue I have is with the lack of information about their
real-world presence. Who are Linden, Jesse, and Alexander? Privacy policies
alone don't exactly solve the issue of instilling trust.

------
rexreed
This is a cool service - maybe I need to RTFM or the comments, but is there an
API by which we can add / modify / delete tasks? Is there a way that third
parties can use / embed this in their own apps?

------
lowglow
Really clean and simple design and implementation. Something everyone should
aspire towards. I love how intuitive it was to set-up a recipe and make my
services work together and for me. Great job!

------
brendino
What an incredible idea! This can become even more valuable if ifttt can open
its platform to enable outside developers to create and distribute custom
action blocks and triggers for end users (like an app store of ifttt triggers
and action blocks).

Furthermore, I can see this transitioning into "phsyical" applications (think
"The Internet of Things"). For example, OnStar can connect car sensors to send
a text message when your car leaves your garage.

------
mikeocool
This site is super great, been using for a little bit to automatically add
anything I tag 'read' on delicious to my instapaper queue.

It would be awesome if there was an output to GET/POST to an arbitrary URL.
Although, I suppose it sort of opens up a bigger issue, as to make it really
useful for integrating with a lot of other arbitrary APIs, you'd probably need
a way to support oauth from arbitrary services as well.

------
SingAlong
Really cool service. I signed up for Instapaper yesterday for the sole reason
that they send read-it-later stuff to Kindle. So I created an ifttt to send my
Pinboard bookmarks tagged "instapaper" to Instapaper. So I can now get only
articles that I choose on my Kindle :) Sw33t

The only thing I'm worried about is giving away so many passwords to one
service. How are these stored?

------
dongsheng
I really like the idea of ifttt, it's like the pipeline for web, the problem
of this service is the latency is unbearable. I created a few tasks to notify
me the rss updates, it may takes more than 30 mins to send me the notification
through jabber, I use notify.me as well, it always comes first.

------
maxxxxx
Nice site. Some thoughts: \- The fonts are way too big. On my 13 inch screen
it feels as if the site is constantly screaming at me. \- How does the phone
trigger work? I suppose it gets triggered when a call comes in. Do you port
the number or how else would you know that a phone call comes in?

------
nicksergeant
I set up a rule a while back to let me know when the temp dips below 60
degrees, and I've been shocked at how useful that is. Can't wait to continue
using the service more.

It's one of those things where you don't really know how useful it is until
you see / hear of some examples and start using it yourself.

~~~
userhasaname
Do you live in the desert?

~~~
nicksergeant
Oh, you have -6 karma. I'll disregard all future comments from you.

------
postscapes1
I haven't looked at the technical side of this yet, but any thoughts on this
being extended to physical object interaction? (see: tweetjects,
<http://www.instructables.com/contest/makeittweet>, Web of Things, etc)

------
arturadib
Nice accessible intro, but it'd be nicer if there was a summary of supported
"this"s and "that"s - I am generally reluctant to sign up for services unless
I know pretty well what's in it for me.

How about a table of supported events and actions, or at least a number of
different examples?

~~~
ajanuary
If you go to <http://ifttt.com/channels> you can see them all. I agree it
should be more accessible without having to log in though.

~~~
rhizome
Forced registration can have its downsides.

------
jorisw
I love it. Both the idea and the simplicity of it.

Could you tell us something about the tech stack? Just curious.

------
snsr
The interface is an absolute joy to use. I was initialy taken aback by the
(large) size of everything, but it makes it surprisingly fun. I love some of
the smaller details; the way 'powered-off' Tasks are greyed out for example.

Can you share any info on your stack?

------
ChuckMcM
Nice tool. The Enterprise version can be targeted to operations types, you
know "if <new employee> then <run through checklist>" "if <mail errors> then
<shoot exchange server in the head>" kinds of things :-)

~~~
smoyer
Why not preemptively shoot the exchange server in the head?

~~~
akat
because you need to justify the purchase of your enterprise version of ifttt

~~~
ChuckMcM
You are like sooo ready for an IT job :-) I used to joke that good IT people
fix problems, great IT people create problems and then fix them.

------
thedjpetersen
I wanted to build a framework similar to this.

<https://github.com/thedjpetersen/Jeeves>

Hopefully I will get a weekend and I will have the opportunity to make it a
little bit more complete.

------
kr1shna
Very nice, just created my first service. It's like pipes for the everyday
man!

------
angrisha
This is amazing! I was lamenting the loss of my smartphone recently <ah..the
eternal need to stay connected!> Been using an old nokia phone. Made a simple
gmail to sms channel using ifttt. Loving it.

------
artursapek
Does this support nested if-then statements, or multiple criteria? With the UI
the "wtf" page demonstrates, it seems like this could easily be designed to
work as a graphical version of programming.

~~~
linden
Right now it just covers a single 'if this then that' statement, but expanding
from there is definitely a direction we could take. However, we'd like to be
really cautious about getting to close to traditional programming as things
could quickly become unaccessible to the wider audience. We talk a lot about
pushing complexity out to the channels themselves. For instance if "its going
to rain tomorrow AND tomorrow is a weekday" might be easier to understand if
its encapsulated in a single, complex trigger.

~~~
artursapek
Also, just my designer's advice, I would do something about the Instagram
icon. It stands out way too much from the rest of the site which I think
you've designed beautifully. Maybe make your own iteration in Illustrator,
mimicing those flat-colored geometric shapes that dominate the design language
of the page?

Something like this: <http://i.imgur.com/viGpC.jpg>

------
imrehg
Oh boy, this is addictive :) Almost like a game of Alchemy - let's combine
these services, what can we have?

You are doing great, guys, will definitely spread the world and come up with
more tasks!

------
nc
Wow, love love love this idea. It's like Automator for the Mac for the web,
but on steriods. Perfect for people using well known apps but for a specific
repeatable purpose.

------
maxwin
This is very innovative. It really inspires me and pushes me to imagine what
other automation/computing one can bring to the masses. I wish you good luck
and success.

------
bglbrg
I was excited to set up SMS notification for lots of things, but it took ifttt
26 minutes to notify me of an email. Hmmm. Any particular reason for the
latency?

------
xycombinator
Can the Action for a Trigger be a different Trigger?

------
snprbob86
Just tried it out: this is awesome. Love the UX!

One major nitpick: Please make my browser's back button work between steps
when creating a task!

~~~
paisible
+1 for the back button.. and for the awesome UI !

------
andrewflnr
Will shorter polling periods be a premium feature? It seems like 15 minutes
might not be sufficient for some purposes.

------
pkamb
What's with the domain name? I see you own ifthisthenthat.com as well, just
curious why you choose the abbreviation.

~~~
linden
Hoping for something easier to type and say in a sentence, think gift without
the g.

------
paisible
great service - already can see so many possibilities. One problem I ran into
: the craigslist search result URL I'm trying isn't being recognized
<http://montreal.fr.craigslist.ca/muc/> Add a bug reporting feature !

------
FreshCode
This is awesome! And it texted to my South African number! Which SMS gateway
are you using?

------
robinhowlett
Really nice! Reminds me of Apache Camel components + Content Based Router EIP
as a service.

------
pitchups
Can it be used to scan a web page and send you an alert if the page has
changed?

~~~
tcarnell
I'm not sure, but this is exactly what <http://femtoo.com> does. Femtoo allows
you to select the exact part (or parts) of the page you wish to track.

------
userhasaname
Why should I trust his website with my API keys? This is not addressed.

------
utexaspunk
Really cool idea, and nice site design except for one glaring thing- the size
of everything! What the hell!? Is this designed for the legally blind? There
isn't even an option in the settings to make things normal-sized... Fix it!

~~~
linden
Thanks for the feedback, will work on tightening the UI a bit and getting a
bit more on the screen.

~~~
linden
Glad to hear some folks like it. Was going for an interface that had a feeling
physicality, something that might not look out of place on a kitchen
appliance. Size was an easy way to accomplish that, but at the expense of
getting lots of info on the screen.

~~~
epaga
In a word I find your style "refreshing". HUGE icons, big text, simple
concepts, easy-to-understand rather than hipster-than-thou. Love it.

------
hypnotist
Any technical details about how backend is implemented?

------
tomlin
This is one of the most powerful tools I've ever seen.

------
russ
This makes me think of 'Daemon' by Daniel Suarez.

------
mainevent
I get a 404 when trying to authorize Evernote.

------
hasantayyar
I prefer "Yahoo pipes". More professional.

------
mohsen
is there any plan on adding grooveshark to the list?

------
jcromartie
It's turing complete!

------
mkramlich
cool idea. great landing page text/graphics. simple. intuitive. good sign from
my perspective whenever something makes me slap my forehead and wish I had
done it. :)

