We're definitely interested in powering the internet of things and webhooks will definitely play a part of that. It remains to be seen if we need to have a generic hook channel to make that possible. I suspect there's one at some point in the future, but I think there are some better ways to address the same problems in the short term that appeal to a broader audience.
There's a big strategic risk in you guys offering web hooks: it facilitates competitors piggybacking on your event detection and building high value response services that compete directly with your own. In other words, you become a piece of costly-to-maintain middleware and others capture the real consumer value.
Good point - it seems like they take this risk into account in the design of their service in a couple of other ways too, like in the triggered actions. For example, you can't send a message to an arbitrary phone or Google Talk account, only your own personal, verified accounts. It would be super useful if you could send more customized messages to anywhere, but then you could build entire services on top of IFTTT.
That is interesting. It seems like the safest thing for them to do would be to offer all of these features (including webhooks) in a "pro" offering which has a monthly fee (probably based on number of notifications). So they treat any developer who wants webhooks as a would-be B2B customer.
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Posting my comment here as well:
We're definitely interested in powering the internet of things and webhooks will definitely play a part of that. It remains to be seen if we need to have a generic hook channel to make that possible. I suspect there's one at some point in the future, but I think there are some better ways to address the same problems in the short term that appeal to a broader audience.
As far as getting developers on board goes: http://techcrunch.com/2012/07/24/ifttt-adds-box-and-plans-ne...
And I can confirm that there is indeed a list of channels we want to build and that a webhook channel is on it.
There's a big strategic risk in you guys offering web hooks: it facilitates competitors piggybacking on your event detection and building high value response services that compete directly with your own. In other words, you become a piece of costly-to-maintain middleware and others capture the real consumer value.
Good point - it seems like they take this risk into account in the design of their service in a couple of other ways too, like in the triggered actions. For example, you can't send a message to an arbitrary phone or Google Talk account, only your own personal, verified accounts. It would be super useful if you could send more customized messages to anywhere, but then you could build entire services on top of IFTTT.
That is interesting. It seems like the safest thing for them to do would be to offer all of these features (including webhooks) in a "pro" offering which has a monthly fee (probably based on number of notifications). So they treat any developer who wants webhooks as a would-be B2B customer.