Only connect

Very much enjoying playing with ifttt.com and all its tasks and channels. Here’s their guide on their service. Only connect, and all that.

Their “recipe” page (‘tasks’, ‘channels’, ‘recipes‘? bit of a mix of ideas there?) lists the tools that users have made and want to share. As well as the more obvious stuff, there’s things like “When a new book is added to Kindle Top 100 Free eBooks, send me an email” and “A reminder email every month to go to http://mypermissions.org and check what permissions you gave to what applications“. I’m sure there are better recipes out there, a little difficult to find the really interesting ones.

I like the laziness of this; do something once and have it also do lots of other things without you having to do anything. Reminds me of our data quality mantra, “enter once, use lots”.

And it was through this site, and the web 2.0 (do we still use that phrase?) compulsion to sign up for lots of sites so that I could, in turn, activate lots of channels, that I remembered that I’ve got a dropbox account and an evernote one too. Very much under-used. Perhaps some ifttt recipes out there (http://ifttt.com/recipes?channel=dropbox&sort=hot and http://ifttt.com/recipes?channel=evernote&sort=hot for ideas, ranked by ‘heat’ – to tie in with the ‘recipe’ thing again?) might give me a reason to reinvigorate those accounts.

Anyway, the recipes I’ve made so far:

I’m using a few others too. As well as boring ones that send favourited YouTube and Vimeo videos to Facebook and Twitter (via Buffer), I’ve got these boring ones:

New bookmark on Pinboard gets sent to Diigo
New bookmark on Pinboard gets sent to Buffer (and then on to Twitter)
If tomorrow’s forecast calls for snow, send me a text message
Archive my Foursquare check-ins to Google Calendar
When a new book is added to Kindle Top 100 Free eBooks, send me an e-mail.

Still at the joining-them-up-because-I-can stage, rather than the joining-them-up-because-they’re-useful one at the moment.

And I’m very much aware of the danger of spamming everyone on Twitter with all these tasks:

My tweets (still hate that stupid word. Surely we can move to a more grown-up one now?) get sent to everyone who follows me, obviously, so let’s ignore them
I can retweet the tweets I like, either the new (boring) way or the old (interesting) way, and they obviously get sent to everyone who follows me, but you may have seen the tweet yourself anyway (one potential repetition)
But say they tweet a link that I like; if I bookmark that link on pinboard, that will get sent to Twitter, via ifttt and Buffer (another potential repetition)
I also might choose to favourite that tweet, and I have another ifttt thing that shoves that to Twitter and Buffer (a third potential repetition)
And if the tweet included a YouTube or Vimeo video, there’s another ifttt thing that separately shoves those across to Twitter too (a fourth potential repetition).

That can’t be good, can it? I like the idea of bookmarking everything that catches my eye, but I don’t want people to think I’m just repeating myself all the time, for lack of anything else better to do.

Anyway.

They should introduce random tasks, I think. We link up all our channels – instagram, email, facebook, rss, craigslist, sms, our mobile number, our linkedin account – and it randomly selects a trigger for a random channel that fires off a random action. That should liven things up a little. And have them tagged #russianroulette.