[justsaysmthng]

Just watched the "how it works" video and I'm less than impressed (can anything impress me these days?).

"Why constantly check e-mail when you can get a text message when anyone important e-mails you..."

Actually, I receive a push notification whenever I receive an email. I'd hate to receive SMS messages instead of e-mails.

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"Say someone tweets something about your company. Set up a flow that follows them, sends a nice reply, adds him to a spreadsheet which then gets sent to Salesforce".

Yeah, so someone tweets "YourCompany fucking sucks!" and now the flow automatically follows him, sends a ridiculous "nice reply" and adds an obviously unsatisfied customer (or whatever) to the CRM..

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"Working smarter, so you can work less and do more",

I think I've heard this promise a thousand times before.

I don't know about the Flow service, but the ad video is quite dumb and uninspired, just like the background music.. who composes all these identical tech ad songs ?

[CamatHN]

You might be right in the certain situations but this is an open tool with a wide array of possible uses for people. Such a pessimistic approach doesn't allow for any exploration when think about its potential uses.

[justsaysmthng]

Frankly, I don't really care. Really. It might be the greatest tool ever created..

There's too much great software and not enough head space to fit it all in.

This proliferation of tools and services hasn't achieved the proverbial "work less do more" which all of them promise.

They are necessary in order to deal with the increased complexity of technology (and our lives), but the catch is - once we integrate them into our work(life)flow, we add another layer of complexity and hence give up even more control to third parties.

I guess this is why Flow has been created, but the catch is the same - once you integrate it, you add another layer of tweaking and twiddling until it all becomes a monster with a life of its own.

There was an article here on HN yesterday - 'you probably don't need any js lib for your project' and I totally agree with the author.

We can live without layers upon layers of complexity, albeit with a bit more 'manual' work - we have to reduce it rather than try to build meta layers on top of existing ones.

Sorry for the gloomy mood, I guess it's the weather.

[arcticfox]

This is basically IFTTT. Tons of people use IFTTT, even if I have only found a need for it a few times.

'you probably don't need any js lib for your project' is true, but 'I can probably use modern JS libs to write a competitor 5x faster than your from-scratch project, assuming it's at least moderately complex' is also true.

[intended]

Well, I've always found what you said to be true anyway, gloomy weather or not.

Theres a lot of tech which we are none the worse off for ignoring. The more curmudgeonly of us eventually figure out what is actually going to move the needle and what isn't.

And as a simple rule - nothing will make your life less difficult, it will only give you more spare time which will then be absorbed into work - or your job is redundant.

hmm, maybe it is the weather.

[chris_wot]

...who composes all these identical tech ad songs ?

Microsoft Songsmith. [1]

1. http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/redmond/projects/song...

[andrei_says_]

It's a genre in itself. Upbeat, empty, disconnected, fake. Just like the copywriting and actors in Microsoft ads.

It's called "Forced Fun."

[jdc0589]

> Yeah, so someone tweets "YourCompany fucking sucks!"

No one would ever use twitter solely for that purpose...surely...

[chris_wot]

Unlikely, that tweet has no spelling errors.

[coldtea]

>I don't know about the Flow service, but the ad video is quite dumb and uninspired, just like the background music.. who composes all these identical tech ad songs ?

Ad composers with a production note: "Make it bland and copying for the Nth time, 2010-era Apple video music".

And stock music services, like this: https://www.musicbed.com/

[soared]

Is it so difficult for you to imagine someone who doesn't have push notifications enabled? I don't like being alerted by emails, but that means I sometimes miss time-sensitive messages from my boss. I would actually like texts when my boss emails me, because that would be the only alert I get outside of normal SMS.

[coldtea]

Sure, but that's a narrow niche for "push"-averting people.

Hardly something to write home about for "working smarter" in general.

[tryitnow]

Interesting. I love the idea of this product, I work in finance and accounting and I'm already thinking of ways to apply.

However, the examples used in this video are awful for the reasons you outlined. Plus, there's already good software solutions for email management and social media monitoring.

I think this ad is pretty bad, but the actual product could revolutionize workflow in many business functions.