So it seems that I’m not only into open and free software but also somehow belong to the Indie web movement. But then again, this seems like a natural reaction against all this cloud centralization thats going on. Fewer and fewer actors owning more and more of your personal data.
What sparked this post was that I read an article on Huginn which is an agent system much like iftt (If this then that) or a scriptable RSS reader on steroids. Agent systems that where all the buzz in the late dot com era (~2000) when i where involved in that.
Huginn seems like a really interesting project that i really have to take a deeper look into later. If only it weren’t written in ruby then 🙁
But then to return to the main issue for this short post. Iftt, even if it seems like a great thing. Are people really trusting one cloud service with access to “all” their other accounts on the web? Like Dropbox, all their google accounts, Facebook, Instagram and Evernote to mention a few.
First off I cant imagine that ifttt can get a working business model by just looking at the recipes you do and since there seems to be no advertising they somehow has to get money out of the information they gather. Second its obvious that this would be a goldmine for any authority requesting information out of cloud providers. Finally losing control over this account would send you chasing application password revocations all over the place.
With all that said Huginn still looks really interesting and perhaps one could modify it to be language agnostic 🙂