That’s what my track & field coach use to say to me when I was training hard for my javelin throw. “Action is Reaction”. But quite a lot of time this law doesn’t work on the internet. There is no physical energy to preserve and indeed energy can be lost. And; more important is lost online.
There are a lot of dead ends in all corners of this mights unvisible space. Although we call it a network. It has many road blocks or other barriers where energy is leaking.
Recent developments is that we connect more and more code to each other. Just a precursor of the machine to machine age. or Internet of Things. Every node can better communicate with other nodes in the network. Much of this is done via API’s. One such company and platform that made this really really easy to use is IFTTT (IF This Than That). It connects all these different nodes to each other. So it can communicate with each other and things ‘stay alive’ just a bit longer.
If an event on a internet connected device or online platform happens it will tricker an event on another one. This goes for a lot of different things. With this blog for example I use it to post automatically to my Twitter feed whenever I put a new blog online to post the subject line with the corresponding URL. (Not a huge fan of auto posting; but this one works for me, and only on Twitter).
But many other nodes (or channels likes IFTTT calls them) can be connected. 71 channels in total. Here is my public profile. Not that special, but makes my life just a bit more convenient. And yes, Evernote becomes more central in my life. It is in many ways kind of a back up system.
The more excentric examples are that you get an sms whenever your favorite sportsteam scores a goal. Or this one. Or your Hue Light is going to shine a bit brighter whenever it is raining outside. This very last one is added just this year and is the very first hardware device that is actually connected via IFTTT. But that will be the way to go.
The internet of things is going to be big. Really big. And you can let it already work in your advance right now! The question is: How many channels will IFTTT have in 3 years?