Automating the Discovery & Sharing of Information Across Multiple Networks with IFTTT (Umbrella Conference 2013)
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This presentation was given at Umbrella Conference 2013.
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Automating the Discovery & Sharing of Information Across Multiple Networks with IFTTT (Umbrella Conference 2013)
- 1. Gary Green Surrey County Council Library Service gary.green@surreycc.gov.uk Automating the discovery & sharing of online information resources across multiple social networks
- 2. Many Places = Many Conversations Many websites focus on networked communication Many people are on networks - discovering, communicating, sharing Locating/sharing information in right way, with right audience, at right time across a number of sites/accounts can be difficult
- 3. Automate to Overcome Problems Automating discovery & sharing of resources Online services inc. www.ifttt.com Benefits & drawbacks of automation Why your input is important The information literacy connection
- 4. What is IFTTT? A free web service IFTTT = If This Then That Connect over 60 online & messaging services (channels) together Automatically feed information/data between channels
- 5. Why is it Useful? Pull information together easily Share information easily Manage information flows Wider online presence Organise it all via a single site Effective use of time & resources
- 6. Which Services Connect? Social networks Bookmarking sites Image, video, audio sharing sites Blogging services Document storage & collaboration Email & messaging services Date, time, weather, stock alerts, health/lifestyle
- 7. How Does it Work? Connect 2 channels together 1st channel is the Trigger 2nd channel is the Response Each Trigger/Response combo is a recipe If Trigger does This action Then Response does That action Recipes are regularly checked & run
- 8. The Recipe Trigger - new RSS item Response - send tweet {{ }} contains data from RSS feed. You add the rest The generated tweet
- 9. Recipes
- 10. Recipes
- 11. Services Similar to IFTTT Zapier https://zapier.com/ WeWiredWeb http://www.wewiredweb.com/ Elastic.io http://www.elastic.io/ Cloudwork https://cloudwork.com/ Wappwolf http://wappwolf.com
- 12. Issues and Drawbacks Information overload It’s easy to bombard people with too much information Uninformative or misleading headlines/article titles in item feeds Information doesn’t get pulled through in the way you expect
- 13. Human Input Check regularly - ensure it works as expected Control how information passes between channels Stop irrelevant information being shared Share manually if more appropriate Use an information literacy perspective…
- 14. Search, Identify, Gather Useful sources of information: Any with an ifttt channel Any with an RSS feed Better to pull in more information & sift later? Don’t automatically assume every item will be relevant…
- 15. Assess and Evaluate Use intermediary stage between discovery/sharing eg Pocket: Some functionality of RSS reader Pocket tags can be used to act as triggers Helps sift out items you don’t want to share
- 16. Communicate and Share Define: Where you want information to be sent When you want it to be shared How you adapt/tailor information to the channel
- 17. Organise and Archive Standardise discovery & sharing methods Keep record/archives/logs of items shared Backup information automatically
- 18. Automating Discovery and Sharing Spend less time juggling different web presences Standardise your information sharing practice Get the machine to take some of the strain Keep control
- 19. Gary Green Surrey County Council Library Service gary.green@surreycc.gov.uk Automating the discovery & sharing of online information resources across multiple social networks.
- 20. Image Credits Social media beakers – iconshock.com Social media heroes – iconshock.com Social media trucks – cutelittlefactory.com Social media hearts – customicondesign.com All other screenshots www.ifttt.com
Notas do Editor
- Many websites now provide users with the ability to participate in social networking – by social networking I mean the 2 way communication between users.This communication often revolves around the need to discover and share information.To give you some idea of numbers of websites and users on them, the ebizmba.com site lists each of the the top 15 social networking sites as having more than 4 million unique monthly visitors each. The most popular service (Facebook) has 750 million unique visitors per month. Wikipedia list 220+ popular social networking sites. “Popular” is the keyword here – there are many more that do not have such a high number of regular users.On a personal level ,I regularly use 3 Twitter accounts; 2 Facebook accounts; 2 social bookmarking sites; 2 Tumblrs; LinkedIn; Google plus; Flickr and Youtube, as part of my day job, advocacy work and personal life.So you can see that if you want to maintain an effective information discovery and sharing presence on these sites at this scale it may be difficult, especially with limited time and resources.
- So, I’m going to talk about one way to overcome some of the difficulties of discovering and sharing information in this context, & I’ll cover…Automating the discovery and sharing process.I’m going to focus on a specific service found online at www.ifttt.com , because it’s a service I’m most familiar with. But I will also give you links to a handful of other services that work along similar lines to ifttt, that might be of interest to you and might suit your circumstances and ways of working better.I’ll talk about when automation is useful, when it doesn’t always work and why human input is just as important.And I’ll talk about the importance of information literacy in this context.
- These are a few of the 50+ recipes I have running at the moment, just to give you an idea of how you can use it.There are a lot that use a service called Pocket here (red symbol with a V in the centre). I use Pocket as an RSS feed reader, as it allows me to pull in news articles to one place and tag them. The tags I use allow me to define which channel the article is shared to via an ifttt recipe.I’m using recipes to send information to Buffer, which is connected to Twitter. This schedules when I send out my tweets. You can see what looks like the same Recipe going to buffer, but they’re different, in that each of them adds a different hashtag to the tweet that is sent out eg #lovelibraries #ebooks etc.
- Here are a few more recipes:In these examples you’ll see that Twitter only appears in the response channel column. There are no Twitter triggers, as Twitter aren’t keen on having content shared in this way.The recipe that includes the weather channel as a trigger automatically tweets from our library account if there’s a chance of snow in the area to forewarn people about any possible library closures. It tweets “Snow forecast tomorrow. Please check our website for possible library closures.”A couple of recipes here are also used for backup/archiving purposes – my bookmarked links on Diigo are backed up on Pinboard; and any photos I share on Facebook are also backed up to my Flickr account.I also use ifttt to build up a work and CPD log by connecting my Google calendar, blogs and Linkedin account to Evernote, which I find useful for appraisals and one-to-ones with my line manager.
- So, I’ve focused on using ifttt here, but there are other similar services available that you could try. And it might be that if you like the look of ifttt, but it doesn’t quite suit what you want to do or the way you work, it’s worth having a look at some of these other services.I’d say Zapier & WeWiredWeb are the most similar services to ifttt.Wappwolf is limited to activity when uploading files to Dropbox, Box, or Google Drive – you can convert files, unzip or share to other places eg Flickr; Google Drive; Slideshare; Kindle. The focus here is on the automation of processes rather than sharing to networks.
- So, what are some of the issues of using a service like ifttt?If you’re increasing the amount of information you’re discovering and you’ve made it easier to share with others you can bombard people with too much information.Sometimes uninformative or misleading articles or news headlines are pulled through.For example, the news headline pulled through from an RSS news feed “New chapter for town library” isn’t very informative. What’s the story behind that? Which library is it talking about? Or maybe the headline isn’t factually correct.Also, will the information pulled through from the trigger source be informativeenough for your readers on the site you’re sending it to?
- So that’s why it’s important to have some human intervention, so you can keep some control over the discovery and sharing process.Make sure you regularly check that your recipes are running smoothly.I control how information is shared by using Pocket as an RSS feed reader (eg like Google Reader), which I use to sift out irrelevant information before sharing. Recently over an 11 week period 3771 news items were fed into my Pocket account from 9 different resources, and I only shared 668 of these items to 10 different channels via Pocket. Therefore only 17-18% of items were worth sharing.If a blog title or news headline isn’t appropriate or informative enough you can decide to share it manually instead of automatically.Ifttt can still do a lot of the repetitive gathering of information, logging into different accounts and sharing, but you can also keep control over it.It also helps to think about your discovery and sharing of information from an information literacy perspective…
- Think about where the useful sources of information are going to be.I find the most useful ones are services that either have a dedicated ifttt channel , or one with an RSS feed of search results as an output.It’s surprising how many original sources of information aren’t fed into social networks, and that’s one of the reasons why you shouldn’t just rely on social networks as your main information source.
- Assess and evaluate the information coming through from your iftttrecipes.Some of my iftttrecipes don’t need to be filtered in any way – for example, any backup or archiving I’ve setup; or if it’s a feed from a trusted source. They can just run automatically without any intermediate filtering stage.But if I need to filter information I use Pocket. This allows me to read and assess the value of the information coming through. If I want to share that information I add a tag to the item in Pocket and the tag I use dictates where the information is shared. Eg. “ggtwitter” will send that item to the my personal Twitter account; “ggLinkedIn” will send it to my LinkedIn account. In this instance I need to use recipes to pull the information into Pocket and another set of recipes to share the information from Pocket to another service.
- Think about where, when and how you want to share that information.Which of your social network accounts do you want to send this information to?When do people need this info? Straight away; Soon; or is it not time critical? For example, it’s generally no good posting an important piece of information on Twitter at midnight when most of your followers are asleep, so you might want to use Buffer to schedule these tweets instead.Adapt or tailor the way you share the information depending upon which network it’s being shared to. For example, you may want to add hashtags to the updates you send out on Twitter, but you wouldn’t include hashtags on updates you send to Facebook.
- Think about standardising the way you pull information together and share it with different services/channels.You could use ifttt to keep a record of what you share with others; creating archives, logs or backing up your social networking data.And don’t forget that if it the information saved in these archives isn’t perfect you can always go in and edit it to tidy it up.
- So, in summary if you either do spend a lot of time juggling different web presences to discover and share information with others, or you want to have more of a web presence, consider automating some of these processes to reduce your efforts and standardise your information discovery & sharing practices.Ifttt or one of the other services I mentioned can help and it lets the machine take some of the strain, whilst keeping enough control of it yourself to ensure that the right information is discovered and shared more effectively.