The great Dropbox-Twitter-Facebook mashup arrives

[Renew Deal]

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.

A new Web application dubbed ifttt.com serves as an excellent yardstick of how far we've come from the early days of specialized, single-purpose mashups, or more complicated SOA where services were cobbled together with complex tools and the coding equivalent of duct tape.

Ifttt.com -- "ifttt" stands for "if this, then that" -- draws on the wealth of APIs for many of today's most popular Web services; it serves as a hub through which users can easily get separate services to work in tandem and carry out incredibly useful, time-saving tasks, called recipes.

Here's how it works: First, you choose a trigger, a specific event that takes place in one of the support services or channels. Currently, ifttt.com claims 35 channels, including Facebook, Twitter, Gmail, Dropbox, WordPress, Foursquare, YouTube, Last.fm, LinkedIn, a stock feed via Yahoo Financial, and more. Now that Google+ has introduced an API, you can expect it be added to the mix. I wouldn't be surprised to see Spotify, too.
<snip>

http://www.infoworld.com/t/cloud-computing/the-great-dropbox-twitter-facebook-mashup-arrives-173341

Interesting idea and I bet it will be useful for some people.