It’s Time To Start Making Data Networks Simple
I saw this tweet over the weekend and thought it was pretty cool:
A year ago I made an @IFTTT recipe to show @instagram photos of fortune cookie fortunes on @Tumblr. 10k posts later: http://t.co/f9gPQDAnTN
— Josh Cook (@TheJoshAbides) January 17, 2014
IFTTT is a powerful tool. Simply by creating a recipe, someone was able to passively compile an enormous library centered around a single idea.
It got me thinking about the myriad things we could track, content we could capture, insight we could glean, or fun we could have with super easily configured algorithms.
It makes me want this powerful capability to be dead simple and instantly accessible to more people (come on Linden!). It feels like, maybe, this is about to tip.
Everyone knows that Google already has interesting data that is driven by search terms (for example, signs of an upcoming flu epidemic). But could we, in a more networked way, also start to make this analysis happen on our own without relying on Google or expensive software platforms?
Seems to me that the tools are there. Let’s start making them more usable.