A while back I started playing around with a service called Ifttt (If this then that). It basically aims to glue the internet together. There are loads of online services out there that we use. Usually though they are siloed in that unless they have expressly decided to integrate with other services we can only use them in isolation. At first this isn’t apparent because everything is integrated with the usual suspects, such as sharing/ liking something on Facebook.

The first one I setup is to post my blog posts to Twitter, I’m sure there is probably a WordPress add on to do this but nowhere near as quick and easy as with Ifttt. This was a while back but I got thinking about it again when I quickly added the #b03 hashtag to the auto generated Tweets for the March blog challenge. The possibilities are really endless with the channels that they have available and they seem to be adding more all the time. They have a list of recipes that is full of actions that others have come up with to give you ideas. The most used one right now is to synchronise your Facebook and Twitter profile pictures, saving you the time to update both. Some other cool ones are: Star an email in gmail to send to Evernote, Backup pictures on Facebook into dropbox, or save email attachments to Dropbox.

Looking through the recipes, it seems like the RSS feed channel is a big enabler right now, as anything being put into any kind of RSS feed can be acted upon.

Currently upon making new posts for AffClicks I am spending a fair amount of time pushing them out through all the social channels and relevant social news top lists like Hacker News, Reddit and Inbound.org, while I don’t think Ifttt is quiet up to the task yet of automating that pipeline it looks to be heading in that direction of taking that work you would usually have to do and fully automating it. Getting the right words down to create valuable content when blogging is the important part, pushing things out to get maximum exposure (what I am usually aiming for with AffClicks based stuff) is the repeatable bit that just takes up a chunk of time.

Investors seem to agree that ifttt has a bright future, recently investing $1.5 million dollars to further fund development. As developers, we tend to look to automate everything in our workflows that we are able to, giving us more time to focus on the parts that matter. So a service like this naturally appeals to us. What will be interesting is whether this can cross the chasm and gain a mainstream following with regular internet users, as the TechCrunch article mentions:

The simple, big-text interface has managed to guide a wide variety of users through it and get them hooked but some pieces of it. But it still has some rough edges. Some pieces, like the curly brackets section for setting up detailed actions, can be confusing to people who aren’t familiar with programming.

After following web applications for a while you end up seeing cycles. A new product comes along which promises to be dead simple, straight to the point, giving you the user a much better experience than you currently have. The product is lacking features but it’s developers claim that the lack of features is a feature.

As a product gains traction though it attracts a diverse set of users, each bringing their own expectations and use cases to the table and many giving feedback of “It’s great but I’d love if it also did…”. Many of these suggestions in isolation sound great, who wouldn’t want that extra functionality.

Generally things can go one of 2 ways, many of these features can be added and the product can continue being iterated and mature. Or most of all feature requests can be knocked back in order to keep the product as simple as the first day it come out. This tends to result in the project stagnating though, things work better when they are constantly moving and come to a grinding halt when they aren’t.

Either way, the product will eventually be ripe for disruption, either it will now be the slow moving behemoth due to years of feature creep or it will be a simple product that has failed to include many things over time that the disruptive competitor can be based around. Things move so fast that the simple product over time may have to be refocused and mostly rebuilt in order to both stay simple and to cover just the right subset of use cases to remain relevant.

While something new may look new and innovative, maybe it is more like something from the previous cycle than we think. An example is how Facebook greatly simplified the social network from the mySpace experience. Facebook identified exactly what people wanted to do on a social network: easily find and chat with their friends, share pictures and organize events. As time has gone by though there are now many aspects to Facebook and it is becoming more complicated all the time, one look at the myriad of privacy options or the different types of content that can now appear in your feed can convince you off this.

We now have the next way with social apps like Path, which is a lot closer to the original Facebook than Facebook is now. Path focuses on the people in your life you want to connect with the most, while your Facebook “friends” list may have ballooned out Path is all about cutting it back. Path is also riding the mobile wave, being predominantly mobile only. In a few years time will we be able to add the next way to this cycle? Will todays simplistic products have either grown to look like todays incumbents or stagnated and forgotten about?

As time has gone by there have been many efforts to create social networks, this isn’t of great surprise as everyone wants to own the platform and you just have to look at Facebook to see how well positioned they have become by having users ingrain their social life around the platform. With many different social efforts though there is no doubt lots of duplication with little feature differences around the edges. Time is not an unlimited commodity so even the early adopters amongst us all  must eventually settle on a collection (or just one) of platforms an apps that best serve our needs.

Path gives a really simple and functional layout on the iphone.

I have been thinking about this recently since getting into the new version of Path, which without using the old version I believe it has moved from a more strictly picture sharing app to include more of the regular social network features such as it’s take on likes, location, statuses etc. In all it is aiming to try and bring a much more close and intimate experience among close friends mainly expressed with photos and videos as opposed to long chains of text based statues and comments. The lack of page/ app spam that you get in Facebook is refreshing and overall it looks a lot nicer (although mobile only). I doubt it would replace Facebook completely for me though, given only certain people will probably be interested in Path and it’s really not the forum for having longer text based discussions via status comments. Also the internet marketer in me does like the keep an eye on business branding and ads on Facebook.

One app that I have used from time to time that I feel that Path really does replace for me is instagram and this is quiet deliberate on Path’s part as they have included image filters, the main thing the differentiated instagram from other image sharing apps in the first place. Path is a lot more natural to build up a list of people to share with than instagram, as instagram, being more on the side of a feature than a fully fledged product doesn’t really draw people in as strongly with network effects. The one thing that can be interesting about it is that it will show you popular public pictures drawn from all users but that itself isn’t really enough to invest the time in it also. I think that it’s harder for apps that are trying to be a featured layered on top of other networks primarily rather than setting out to create their own. Another app is Batch, from the creators of Daily Booth. This app attempts and succeeds in my opinion to create a better interface for creating and sharing albums (batches) of photos. Again they have the problem of the overhead of having to use their app, then post to Facebook or Twitter, then have people authorize their app when it pops up in their feed to see your album. This is a feature app just waiting for the big players to get right themselves and build it in.

Google+ as most know is another slightly different take on the social network. It’s something that I would love to see work, as it would be great to build a network of mostly like minded tech people to talk in depth with. I have read that this kind of thing is happening with a lot of groups, unfortunately (or possibly fortunate for participants) a lot of this quality conversation is locked away in circles thus making it appear as somewhat of a ghost town to the rest of us. Most of what I see is posts from famous/ internet famous people and companies building an audience in yet another place, some of this is insightful but not necessarily social. Again network effects make something like Google+ difficult to kickstart, a similar thing occurred with their failed Google wave effort where people would eagerly jump on try try it out, only to give up once they realised no one they knew was on there, only for friends to come along later and find the same thing when they are trying it out. It is a contrast to their browser Google Chrome in which for every incremental user gained it is immediately useful to them without them needing their network dragged along into it to, this means it has been far easier for Google to build a large market share of active, engaged users.

Despite the character limit I find Twitter is current much more useful for this type of like minded tech discussion via @ replies and links to interesting content. I have also noticed of late that the feed from Twitter ends up being a lot nicer due to the uniformity in postings rather than being very disjointed as Facebook has become given the many types of postings that may end up in your feed. From the new timeline effort you can see that Facebook is slowly starting to attack this problem of being unappealing visually and disjointed. Even while I am approaching 100 followers on Twitter it is still very much a consumption medium for me as it feels like much content being produced is largely ignored, this isn’t really surprising as it is largely an inpersonal network where many people are following you because of common interest rather than personal friendship so your post becomes one more in a fairly fast moving stream depending on how many others are following.

Then there are many apps that attempt to layer themselves on top or across these networks, you have no doubt used things that allow you to post and share across many different mediums. Interesting things to like FlipBoard for iPhone/iPad that attempts to aggregate Facebook, Twitter and online news sources to form your own personal magazine.

I’m interested in what others have settled on. Do you use a wide variety of apps or find it to be tiresome to keep on top of them all or do you abstain from the whole concept in general?