IFTTT v Pinboard – BFFs again

After a little drama and consternation, it looks like the IFTTT people and the Pinboard person have reached some sort of agreement on the way forward. There aren’t many details but IFTTT sent out an email on Thursday (31 March) which largely apologised for mistakes made, lack of clarity about certain aspects of the new platform and confusion about the terms and conditions.

Hello Pinboard Customers,

We’ve made mistakes over the past few days both in communication and judgment. I’d like to apologize for those mistakes and attempt to explain our intentions. I also pledge to do everything we can to keep Pinboard on IFTTT.

IFTTT gives people confidence that the services they love will work together. There are more services in the world than IFTTT can possibly integrate and maintain alone. We are working on a developer platform that solves this by enabling service owners to build and maintain their integration for the benefit of their customers.

The vast majority of Channels on IFTTT are now built on that developer platform by the services themselves. We made a mistake in asking Pinboard to migrate without fully explaining the benefits of our developer platform. It’s our responsibility to prove that value before asking Pinboard to take ownership of their Channel. We hope to share more on the value of our platform soon.

I also want to address Pinboard’s concerns with our Developer Terms of Service. These terms were specific to our platform while in private beta and were intended to give us the flexibility to evolve our platform in close partnership with early developers. We’ve always planned to update and clarify those terms ahead of opening our platform and we are doing so now. We are specifically changing or removing areas around competing with IFTTT, patents, compatibility and content ownership. The language around content ownership is especially confusing, so I’d like to be very clear on this: as a user of IFTTT you own your content.

I truly appreciate all of your feedback, concerns and patience. Helping services work together is what IFTTT does. We respect and appreciate the open web. This very openness has been instrumental in enabling us to build IFTTT and we fully intend to pay it forward.

Linden Tibbets
CEO, IFTTT

There were certainly mistakes made although I’m not so sure about the other stuff. That said, this is certainly a positive development and Pinboard’s Maciej Cegłowski seems to agree:

I had a nice talk with @ltibbets last night, and it sounds like they’ll try to keep Pinboard/IFTTT recipes working for a while longer

— Pinboard (@Pinboard) March 31, 2016

I’m persuaded IFTTT is trying to act in good faith, and I hope things work out for people using that service with Pinboard. *sips juice*

— Pinboard (@Pinboard) March 31, 2016

It’s not clear how much longer Pinboard will remain connected to IFTTT. I imagine the parties came to some sort of agreement about modifications to IFTTT’s terms and conditions and requirements for integrating Pinboard into the new IFTTT platform. The approach for now seems to be a “wait and see” approach but it’s a step in a better direction.

The future of IFTTT lies in the platform thing they’re doing. The future of Pinboard lies on the sofa. These are hard to reconcile

— Pinboard (@Pinboard) March 31, 2016

With all that, we can probably return to our regularly scheduled programming or work and carry on. As for my complaints about Cegłowski’s apparent lack of empathy, his sarcasm is growing on me.

My hope is that we’ve squeezed all the triple-washed drama out of the IFTTT pouch.

— Pinboard (@Pinboard) March 31, 2016

Yup.

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If you missed the saga, you can catch up here:

Part 1:

IFTTT v Pinboard

Part 2:

IFTTT v Pinboard Redux – Contracts and Condescension

Image credit: Pixabay