What is wrong with #Facebook #Twitter #GooglePlus sharing, and howIFTTT can help.

It's taken me almost a week to try and figure out how to share across multiple platforms and stay connected with all my various communities, and I have come to the conclusion that there is no elegant solution.

The problem lies in that all the social platforms are not becoming more open, but, in fact, they are more closed than ever.

You can share from Facebook to Twitter fairly seamlessly, by using going to your Twitter settings and linking it to Facebook, and vice versa, but this leaves Google+ out in the cold.

You can use a service like gplus.to to RSS your Google+ feed, and have that then post to Twitter/Facebook/etc. via ifttt.com, but you lose all rich data, like links and images, to be replaced by bit.ly links.

Twitter doesn't auto expand links from bit.ly, nor does Facebook or App.net, which is strange, cause if you post a link natively on those platforms, if will expand, give the webpage title and even an image of the site.

That is how they hook you in and force you to post from their site.

So, the elegant solution with inline images and web-previews are out, but what if you don't have time to check and update all your social networks?

In comes IFTTT.COM

IFTTT.COM (if this then that) is actually a great service, that can do a plethora of things based on rules (they call it recipes) that you set, which, when the rule is met, an action is taken. These actions can vary from mailing you whenever the weather changes at set times of the day, to reposting tagged images on Facebook to Instagram, and there are thousands of pre-made recipes online at their site.

I have recipes that save Instagram photo's Flickr, report on changing weather, post Google+ to Facebook and mirrors my App.net to Twitter. Plus, there are various community builds that use hardware sensors to do all kinds of home automation & social integration (take for example the Belkin WeMo switch).

So, for the time being, or until Google releases the long awaited wrtite API (for more info check here), you are kinda stuck using various hacks, all the while, competing services are becoming more closed and stripping functionality and access from their API's (I am looking at you, Twitter) to force you to use their site.


For more on this, Frederic Lardinois wrote a great article over at TechCrunch.
It's called "Will Google+ Ever Get A Full Read/Write API?"