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by jazzychad 4305 days ago
And still no webhooks - http://blog.jazzychad.net/2012/08/05/ifttt-needs-webhooks-st...

This one thing would blow up usage by developers across the board.

1 comments

"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." -- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4344335

In other words, something like webhooks hurts the bottom line of this "open platform" (quote from OP.) Maybe IFTTT is only useful because a lot of the services it consumes don't make it easy to do these things, because it would diminish their own value. It's greedy walled gardens all the way down.

Their main competitor Zapier.com does offer web hooks, in an open fashion, so I'm not sure that argument still holds.

Also, there is still a lot of value that can be added by the middleware besides repeated polling, such as filtering and facilitating easy setup