I’m sure many of you also received this message in your inboxes today from IFTTT:
“In recent weeks, Twitter announced policy changes* that will affect how applications and users like yourself can interact with Twitter’s data. As a result of these changes, on September 27th we will be removing all Twitter Triggers, disabling your ability to push tweets to places like email, Evernote and Facebook. All Personal and Shared Recipes using a Twitter Trigger will also be removed. Recipes using Twitter Actions and your ability to post new tweets via IFTTT will continue to work just fine.”
I will post a more complete entry for Week Three regarding dashboards in a little while, but I thought that this development is an interesting talking point for class to consider. I have to admit that before I began to understand how Twitter can be used to connect through multiple platforms, I questioned its ultimate usefulness in some ways. It is certainly not as easy in Twitter as it is in Pinterest, (for example) to find and connect with the right people to follow. It seems to take a lot of use of Twitter before those people begin to emerge as ‘follow-worthy’. Yet I was excited by the idea that companies are stepping in to fill the need for connectivity amidst these various platforms.
I would think that Twitter’s move here is a foolish one, although it looks like there is still hope for IFTTT to work with Twitter (somehow) despite the new restrictions. As I have been thinking about dashboards and why it seems so hard for a single dashboard to control all of my various filters and feeds, this development does bring home the complexity of filling such a need in what must be a wildly shifting, constantly changing landscape.
It’s kind of amazing that any companies emerge to fill these needs at all!
Finding the Road 