Mashing Up Multiple Web Services

GMGruman writes "Ted Samson reports on a new Web application dubbed ifttt.com that mashes up all those Web services we routinely use. Today's Web is brimming with a staggering number of services where users can speak their mind (Twitter), grab vital information (any news or blog source), store important files (Dropbox or Box.net), collaborate with peers (Facebook or Google+), and much more. The dream has long been to devise ways to get these often disparate and siloed services to interact with one another, creating something greater than the sum of its parts. It serves as a measure of how far we've come from the early days of specialized, single-purpose mashups, or more complicated SOAs where services were cobbled together with complex tools and the coding equivalent of duct tape."

Re:An decent start, but needs more

[derGoldstein]

For this to be useful, you're gonna need counters, nested conditions, decision trees, etc.. Most people will only use part of them, or even just the one "if/then" functionality, but there's an opportunity to cater to "power users" by offering a more robust system.

That said, I think this thing is proof of how neurotic all of these "social services" have become. If we're setting up triggering mechanisms to make the multiple services work together, something's gone wrong with either the way we live, or how much bureaucracy we're willing to put up with. Are we really heading in a direction where we have to *program* how we communicate with friends? Isn't that what these services are supposed to *solve*?