URL
https://booleans.io<p>BACKGROUND
Last weekend I posted Booleans.io here, much to the amusement of the Internet.<p>As it turns out, a good number of people saw a legitimate use for this service. I had a CS student reach out wanting to use it for a class project. Others found it useful for prototyping feature flags without setting up a database. And some wanted to connect it to IFTTT's maker channel. One person just wanted to know: "How can I pay for this?"<p>For some it was just a cool/fun API to play around with. There are now open source client libraries written in Ruby, Python and Typescript.<p>One of the most requested features was the ability to create private booleans that only you can read/write, and custom labels.<p>So I spent last week hacking on it and just launched those features yesterday. You can signup here to check it out: https://booleans.io/signup<p>CONCEPT
I look at booleans kind of like the ones and zeros of binary code. They're the most fundamental building blocks that can be used to carry out more complex actions.<p>A simple true or false (on/off, yes/no) value could be used to trigger a variety of events - IoT, home automation, software builds or anything else imaginable.<p>Soon I'll be rolling out webhooks, making it even easier to respond to events.<p>MONETIZATION
This service lends itself well to the freemium model. Paid subscribers could have a higher cap on booleans, a higher API rate limit and analytics/data-vis tools.<p>ROADMAP
Eventually I think it would be cool if users could "subscribe" to other users' booleans in kind of a marketplace fashion. Companies could also publish booleans relevant to whatever industry they're in, and consumers could then subscribe to get updates. I realize there's some overlap with IFTTT but I think they can happily co-exist.<p>THE END
Thank you for all the great comments/discussions from last week and I welcome any feedback or questions.<p>- Alan
Not completely jokingly, you could follow up with constants.io (the domain is currently available).<p>It would be used for "constants" in the programming sense-- i.e., named values that are not actually constant over time, but rarely change. You could be the global repository for config files! :)
Love it! How about NaaS? Null as a service? You'd need to make the return value configgable somehow, to yield a NULL, Null, None, Nullptr or 0 depending on the consumer.