I have an idea.
I'm thinking about a service which will inform you about any kind of events,
results and news you are interested in. Aren’t you boring by looking for the game
results of your favorite football clubs every Saturday? How about checking
currency exchange rates and stock quotes every morning? How often are you searching
for new episodes of some lovely movie series? Yes, its all annoying, especially
if you have many different interests. I want to get all of them "in
time" without additional notifications and extra effort. In this paper I'll
describe my thoughts how such service should look and how it could be
easily implemented by Twitter and about similar but different solutions from
"ifttt".
First of all,
information should be delivered to you by itself. It should be pushed to you by
the most useful channel. It could be email, tweet, facebook message, or sms.
Imagine that you are opening a configuration
page on this service, adding a new "event trap", choosing the category
Sport => Racing => Formula1, checking desired check boxes, for example,
GP Qualification Top10, GP Race Top10, Standings after race etc, and then
saving this configuration. Also you could setup regular events and specify the period
of notifications: weekly, every working day, each second Friday etc. But i see an
insurmountable problems for this service implementation. There are categorization of possible events and details extraction about triggered event.
We are living in a
very socialized and informational society in despite of home country. You can
find appropriate data sources like rss, Twitter or Facebook accounts on
official sites for many of your interest subjects. But you also will have
problems with them, because along with required events & results you'll get
a lot of news, reposts and other collateral informational trash. How to deal
with it? I could propose a solution only for Twitter. If Twitter will invent
tags for tweet and allow a following user by those tags (not whole flow as it now),
this will let to follow @House_MD only by "New Episode", @LiverpoolFC
only by "Match Result", @CouchDB only by "Release", @Google
only by "UI redesign".
A few months ago
“ifttt” was launched. The full name of this service is "If This Then
That". It lets you to configure triggers from predefined list, and setup
actions also from predefined list. For example I'm using it to inform by
twitter about each my post at blog. I was even able to setup a trigger which
sends me Liverpool game results from the official
site feed, but for some reason it doesn’t always work. Although it’s a very nice service but it works only via API of
other services, so its not so flexible.
I want to be
always pushed with information that I need. I hope if I have such a desire that
other people also could want it. Its one of the best practices to launch some
useful service, when you make it for yourself but also thinking about other
people’s needs. Ifttt startup proves that a niche of automatic information delivery exists. I suppose Google or Yandex could
make this service easily. Otherwise we should ask Twitter to make tags for this purpose.
Does anyone linked with influential employees at Twitter? =)
