These last few weeks I have had reason to think about a couple of services that I use and have come to love over the years, even depend on, yet they are pretty much invisible in the sense that they are so totally integrated into other apps and services that some, at least I, sometimes forget about them…until they break down, or until my access to them is blocked.
I am talking about services that let you do things like:
- Populate your calendar with gigs for bands that you like, based on what you listen to
- Sends you a mail/text (SMS) if there is going to be rain
- If you send a tweet with a link, that link automatically gets saved to your delicious.com account
- In your browser (regardless of your browser make) lets you type things like “flint football” and you immediately are taken to a search results page on Flickr for the term “football” and it is sorted by interesting/relevance
- In your browser (regardless of your browser make) lets you type “wiki pantera“, “gim furry things“, “gn london 2012” or “tpb linux” and you will be taken to relevant results in other services
- If someone tags you in a photo on Facebook, automatically download that photo to your dropbox storage account
There are sooo much more they allow you to do, so let me present a few of them here in case you haven’t got the above functionality by other means already.
ifttt
I came across ifttt.com a year or so ago, and as per usual when I find a new service I signed up without thinking too much about it, what it could do and how I would benefit from it (cyber junkie sign-up in short). I didn’t actually set it up properly, and for a while forgot completely about it, but a few months later, as I installed apps on my phone, or saw people mentioning it (ifttt) in other articles etc I went back and had a look if I a) could get my head around what it does and b) would benefit from it.
It could also be noted that I had been using the services of ping.fm, however as they had been purchased by Seesmic and finally had been butchered I was looking at alternatives for that too. I quickly realised that ifttt.com easily could replace ping.fm and then some, and ifttt, as opposed to Seesmic, is free. So what is ifttt?
Firstly, ifttt uses “channels” (flickr, facebook, twitter, telephone, mail etc). You then combine several channels into a “recipe”. The recipes can be set to run on specific keywords, or by a certain action.
To get a feeling for what type of recipes you can use, have a look at this recipe list, ordered by “popular”. Once you have set up your recipe it starts to work for you, and you don’t need to go back to ifttt.com again (unless you want to amend a recipe or get a new one), and this is also why I call ifttt and the other services in this article “invisible”. After you have set it up, they just work behind the scenes, like the recipes in the ifttt case.
Go check it out. If you use more than one “channel” (which is very likely, as it includes e-mail, facebook, twitter, even phone…) you just might find it very useful indeed. I know I have.
Yubnub
Yubnub.org was actually the reason I decided to type this blog post: recently the service was down (due to Joyent, the hosting company), and I was suffering. I mentioned the excellent service of Yubnub back in 2009 in an article I called “10 Browser Based Research Tools” and what I wrote then still holds true. If you then add a couple of years of muscle memory and many with me have realised how much we have come to depend on Yubnub working in the innards of our browsers, making us find things on the internet a lot faster, with better precision than any search engine. In this time and age of centralised settings for Chrome and Firefox it even sets itself up on my new machines. Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
Last.fm
The last one is a golden oldie, however, I think people are not talking enough about the excellence of last.fm, perhaps because it has gotten in the shadow of Spotify, Soundcloud and of late Songkick (all of them excellent services in their own right though). I still hold the light for last.fm though, mainly because it has a few aces up its sleeves (apart from being a friendly bunch of people). The main benefit, to me, is that last.fm, and their “scrobbler”, can be added to pretty much any music player out there. In theory it means that you can go to their web site, sign up, download the scrobbler(s) for your music players, set a few parameters and never go there again, and you will still get your calendar populated with relevant and interesting gigs for bands that you listen to, or similar bands, in your area.
Yes, I know Songkick has a similar feature, however that is a dated snapshot based on your music collection, or based on (my slightly schizophrenic) Spotify playlists. I don’t know about you, but my music collection includes more things than I actually listen to, which is why I prefer last.fm doing this dynamically based on what I actually have listened to, especially as that might change over time and thus should also the gig recommendations change IMHO.
Now, if you also want to visit your last.fm profile page (i.e not only use last.fm as an invisible service) you will notice that they also help you find not only similar music to the stuff you already listen to today, and not only what your friends have/are listening to. In addition to that they also have a section called Neighbours. Basically it is people that share the same music listening patterns/taste as yourself. Now, for me, listening to rather obscure extreme metal, this is a gold mine for me in finding new music to listen to. If I listen to 5 bands someone else is also listening to, and they listen to 2 other bands that I have never heard of, chances are I will like those 2 bands too, right? I don’t even have to add the “neighbours” as friends to get the benefit of their music listening habits. Excellent.
Summary
The one challenge these services obviously have would be to monetize on what they do. This became apparent when Yubnub went down, and discussions regarding the service popped up in Google Groups, with several people saying “how can I pay you to help the service going?” to the creator of Yubnub. For services that are completely integrated into peoples browsers, inboxes or music players it can be tricky to find new ways to make money.
Advertising obviously doesn’t work, as the point of the service being invisible is that I don’t have to go to it, and should it all of a sudden fill my browser with ads I would quickly stop using it, yet I wouldn’t mind at all to pay a smaller fee for services that are ultra-useful. Perhaps monthly newsletters with a link to a voluntary payment page would yield more money than nothing…or perhaps Flattr has another area to explore…?