I don't think you're going to get it. It's the same issue with instant messaging now. There's a business incentive not to allow interoperability.

Common interchange of what, though? IFTTT's utility came through connecting disparate services - Reddit to Pinboard, Twitter to Facebook and so on.

If all those services provide JSON blobs, that's halfway to making an RSS feed of them or building a custom search interface or what have you. The other half is standardizing common field names (so you don't have the same field named "created" or "published" or "date" depending on the source); Dublin Core and the like take care of that.

> Common interchange of what, though?

Common interchange of schemeless data. Take data from here, put there.

Pushing JSON blobs around, essentially.

Isn't that what HTTP POST/PUT is for? GET for pull?

HTTP POST/PUT/GET are underlying primitives for these automation systems, which are essentially polished messaging buses.

This isn't obvious. How do you decide what to do with the information you receive?

How do you encode "Oh, this service lets you tweet, but this one lets you only share links?"

How do you have a protocol that lets you handle both Twitter and Google Calendar?

At one point you're basically making a protocol that's a programming language, and we already have JSON + most languages.

So the answer to this is "JSON, or whatever other dictionary serializer you like".

http://webintents.org/ had a go at this problem

This is kind of an idea a coworker and I have been toying with. At it's core, all you really need is a pub-sub server, with daemons publishing and consuming some JSON blobs. Redis is a pub-sub server out of the box, write some simple Python wrappers that poll web pages, RSS feeds, etc. and publish, and on subscribes perform actions (i.e. hit the API!)

I would like to convert a script I have which polls from my Gmail for credit card charge notifications and publishes to Airtable (which works great for this task!) to a more-general Gmail listener which publishes, and a more-general Airtable publisher which can be setup to record certain messages.

We have such a system already, it's called PubSubHubbub. It's an open protocol, and there are already multiple servers (paid and free) and support by software, both by publishing systems like Wordpress and by news readers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PubSubHubbub

https://github.com/pubsubhubbub

Like RSS, iCal, IMAP, and so forth? Or are you thinking of something else?