How many digital/online profiles do you maintain?
If you are reading this, then chances are you have multiple online profiles and I’d bet a few more than you’d like to have. In fact, I bet you’ve created profiles on sites that you’ve long since abandoned or maybe even on sites that have long since disappeared. A newer dilemma in today’s digital landscape is just how to keep up with the all the sites and the volume of information inflow we see each day.
When posting information do you find yourself copying information across multiple profiles or cross posting on multiple sites?
When you take a spontaneous photo and send it to Instagram do you also post it Facebook? When you send a link to an article on Twitter do you also post that link on Google+? If you post a status update on LinkedIn do you also cross-post that status on Twitter? Ideally we post information on platforms that are relevant to the audience there. But it does happen that people make connections within the same audience group and that group spans multiple online profiles.
Or you might find yourself taking content from a blog post, status update, email etc. and archiving it in a tool such as Evernote. Each individual tool has it’s own archiving capability, but you like to centralize all of the important stuff to make retrieval a bit easier.
If this then that….
What I’ve framed in the preceding paragraphs sounds like a logical condition loop in programming “if this then that” (just need an ‘else’!). As you might suspect, there’s a site for that: IFTTT – Put the Internet to work for you. Describing this to people, I would call it a rules engine. You essentially define a digital channel, a trigger action from that channel, and then an action to a second digital channel. They call it a recipe.
The point is to automate actions that you might already be doing manually. They are taking advantage of the application programming interfaces to connect profiles together. It’s like a switchboard of digital profiles.
I created a few recipes.
The tool contains many more digital channels to create huge number of possible combinations. There is also some flexibility in what information is transferred to the action channel. That’s in the setup.
What tools do you use to automate your digital life?
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