chem-bla-ics: Open knowledge dissemination (with @IFTTT)

"... FriendFeed was a brilliant platform for disseminating research and also for exchange of data. Actually, it is a brilliant platform, but when they sold themselves to FaceBook, it got a lot quieter there. And, as said, communication needs a community, and without listeners it is just not the same. Scientists just moved to different social platforms, and it is no surprise FriendFeed didn't show up in Richard van Noorden's recent analysis. A lot of good things happened on FriendFeed, but one was that it used RSS feeds and users could indicate which information sources they liked to show up there. Try my FriendFeed account. Better even was that listeners could select which of my information sources they do not want to listen to. For example, if you were not interested in Flickr images of Person X, but the others sources were interesting, you just silenced that source. Brilliant! But this feature of using RSS to aggregate dissemination channels is not repeated by other networks, and If This Then That fills that gap. Unlike FriendFeed it does not aggregate it, but send the items to external social networks (and many other systems), including FaceBook and Twitter. It does a lot more than RSS feeds (e.g. check out the Android app), but that is an important one for me and the point of this blog post ..."