ifttt.com a new swiss army knife for social

I recently submitted a talk to open source bridge. It’s a new conference dedicated to the ideas behind open source.

My talk is about how I patch over the holes that are created between systems like google reader, tumblr, and twitter. All of that work has been eclipsed by a new tool called ifttt. They don’t win any points in the name pronunciation department, but there tool works. The idea is if this, then that.

Like if you tweet a link, then post it to tumblr.

I saw someone playing around with it on picplz the other day so I signed up.

I have been building my own tools for years to glue things like google reader, which I love using, to tools like twitter, which I am not so stoked about. They are still missing two things. I like to track my links stats, it’s 10x easier if I can use my own bit.ly api token, it’s even better if I can use my own shortener service, but all take just using my own bit.ly API key. The second thing that is missing is rate limiting things to twitter.

Twitter is a medium where people don’t like it when one user dominates their stream. If you tweet like 5 things in a row, it doesn’t matter if you tweeted awesome things, it looks like spam. Users will unsubscribe, besides that you get more twitter juice if things trickle into the twitter sphere.

So, these guys are building something quite cool. If they get everything I need I would be willing to spend close to $100 a year for their service. $100 a year because all of these things have required me to buy something like a linode before, which even at it’s cheapest is $239.40. So, I am saving 130 bucks, without the overhead of trying to keep it running.

Update:

They have already been hard at work adding the ability to share things on google reader. Awesome.