If This Then That – Social Web Glue

Warning: contains blatent hyperbole!

I wasn’t going to do a blog post for this, because I really have nothing useful to add to the web. I can’t give insight, explain what it means or produce any sort of meaningful evaluation, other than to say “yay, me too!”.

But I’m going to anyway, because I want to be noted as one of the first(ish) people to say that IfTTT will change the way we use the social media.

If anyone remembers Microsoft Popfly it’s a little bit like the mashup portion of that, only better, easier to use, and with less bugs. (aside: wow, popfly.com now redirects to bing.com. Raaandom!)

It allows you to glue together your social media accounts, using If..Thenlogic. So, a good example might be: IF a new post appears on reallyimportantstuff.com THEN post it to my Twitter account.

There’s support for all the main social media channels and I imagine they’re rushing to add the rest. If they’ve half a brain they’re also data mining all the data, but eveyone else is doing that anyway, and it’s really going to be the way things are from now on, so meh, good on them for getting their hands on holistic, end-to-end usage data. There’s so much they can add to this, it’ll be really interesting to see where they go with it.

Here’s what I’ve done in the last half hour:

The GoogleTalk tasks are cool. There’s a GoogleTalk IM user to which you can send messages and depending on your hashtag it will post them on for you. I much prefer to do that whilst I’m at work – there’s no chance I’ll get distracted! I might also set up one for Evernote or ReadLater for URLs which I come across which I want to read later. (another aside: now, if I can find a way of getting them onto my Kindle (for free) then we’ll be cooking!)

The reason I’m raving about this over and above all the other mashup creations out there are: 1) it is (or has the potential to be) all-encompassing and 2) it’s easy to use. It’s definitely not a novel idea, but it’s done so well, and is so intuitive and that’s what gives it wings. A good friend of mine has a favourite saying: “You don’t have to be the first, only the best.” It’s a great motto for small startups in the IT sphere. Don’t worry if someone else already has your idea, just make the best product you can and people will come.

Thank you to Scott Hanselman for introducing me to ifttt. Scott’s blog is definitely worth keeping an eye on – he’s a MS employee but also well-rounded, thorough computer enthusiast and technology geek. He also seems to keep solving all the little problems in life which I keep coming across!