Pulling it all together

[ursangnome]

Mostly for jducoeur...

Ifttt: If This Then That, a service that provides triggered actions on social media sites. Things like, "If I am tagged in a photo on Facebook, then save a copy of that image to my DropBox". It looks to have simply taken the APIs of any number of services, and gives you a bridge for actions between them.

For examples of what the system does, you can look at their "Recipes" page.

Not that I'm a big user of social media, but I can see how interesting this could be to some.

Comments

[jducoeur]

Quite intriguing -- thanks for the pointer! At least in high concept, it sounds similar to a framework I was considering building; we'll see whether it works well enough to completely obviate any need for me to do so...

[jducoeur]

Initial reactions: humph -- it doesn't include LJ. That's a pity, because I can think of things I'd do right off the bat if it did.

OTOH, it *does* have an email channel. That implies that, at least in theory, we might be able to subscribe ifttt to the Carolingian Mailing List, and have it auto-repost to FB and G+. Has potential, although hooking the conversation threads cleanly (which is the really interesting bit) might be beyond it.

(On further research: yeah, it doesn't appear to have any way to post a *comment*, which is sad but unsurprising. That's the holy grail for me.)

Overall, it's a nice little tool, but unfortunately more limited than it looks at first glance. They don't have all that many channels yet (relatively speaking), and the actions you can perform turn out to be fairly limited, probably due to the API restrictions of the systems they are hooking to. For example, I can trigger from my own Facebook actions, but *not* from those from a group, which would be much more useful. (OTOH, you *can* trigger on a Page, which is interesting.) I'd say it's worth paying attention to, but so far it's a bit minor...

[umbran.livejournal.com]

Well, I think it is designed as a personal tool. If I am subscribed to the Carolingian mailing list, and there's a new e-mail, then I can do something for myself with that information. It isn't yet geared for business or organizational use.

[jducoeur]

I think you're correct. I was just hoping for something a bit more powerful, since most of my use cases of interest are community-oriented. (Read: I'm looking for ways to help tame Carolingia's current communications morass.) We'll see whether ifttt decides that this is an interesting market to pursue...