Absolutely true. MQTT exists, as does CoAP and AMQP. There's also simple JSON blobs that can be emitted under an API. None of these things are hard... ... But

Absolutely true. MQTT exists, as does CoAP and AMQP. There's also simple JSON blobs that can be emitted under an API. None of these things are hard... ... But they do free you from the company. And these days, ball-and-chaining you to their servers is the big "In" thing to do. Now for me, I'm a big fan of Node-Red. It's best described as a IFTTT for your machine/network. Runs locally, and just works. I also use PageNodes, a client-only modification of Node-Red. You can use it here: http://ipfs.io/ipfs/QmSCrZUPkqH4gsncsD7tGXPiFpymsbwmywsHXLDhBtSQ6T/ http://ipfs.io/ipfs/QmSCrZUPkqH4gsncsD7tGXPiFpymsbwmywsHXLDh... (It's an IPFS link, and is on the permanent web. That link will always work as long as machines are hosting it.) EDIT: Really? Multiple -1's for a valid criticism of "companies want you locked in to their network"? We just got done with Google killing off a whole platform because of extensive tie-in to 'cloud servers'. I'm just giving a converse answer how to approach the problem.