Recently, I found myself needing a new utility for my projects. In fact, in middle 2013, I founded a live music event in my city: the Muzik! Zyklon. It took not long before I realized that I needed something to deliver news (and especially Muzik! Zyklon related news) towards several different social networks and services at the same time. If I had my own Web hosting service, I could develop some PHP code to achieve the wanted result. But it was not the case.
Though, at the current state of development, the major Social Networks (Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Tumblr, ...) have internal options to integrate each other. Twitter, for example, includes Twitter for Facebook to share contacts and automatically post twits to your Facebook timeline. And Facebook offers its own Twitter API based App to share Facebook posts to your Twitter timeline.But, what if you want to share your Blogger posts towards your Facebook timeline or a Facebook page that you administer? So, I searched in the Web and found and tested three services that can work for you (if you have my same needs, of course).
The first one is IFTTT. IFTTT means "If This Then This". Essentially IFTTT lets you create little recipes. Recipes are composed by an event (the first This) that happens on the source Social Network (that could be the publication of a post on Blogger) and an action (the second This) performed on the destination social network (for example, to publish a summary of the Blogger post on Facebook). IFTTT offers a visual User Interface to create your own recipes or you can pick up a recipe created by other IFTTT users.
One of the limits I found is that IFTTT handles only one Blogger blog per user. I have more then one blog and I would like to deliver my blogs posts on different Facebook pages.
The second one is Zapier. Zapier recipes are called zaps composed by a trigger and an action. It works almost the same way of IFTTT though Zapier is not fully free. It allows up to 100 tasks per month with a free account.
Though Zapier seems to support a lot of services (called apps; IFTTT calls them channels) while IFTTT supports 124 services.
The third and latest service is dlvr.it. dlvr.it provides routes, instead of recipes or apps; source and destination instead of trigger and action. Like Zapier it has a free plan and upgrade plans. The most interesting feature of dlvr.it is the queue ability. dlvr.it permits you to add interesting news you picked up from the Web to a queue and will publish them to your networks when people is online to gain visibility. This feature could be very useful especially for independent projects, open source projects, organizations, agencies or companies who need to be visible.
My conclusions are that in the latest years several external services covered the lacks of the major social networking platforms offering a wide range of services to permit the final user to perform many tasks.
My only concern is that solutions are scattered around the Web and entropy is constantly increasing. :-P
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