Accessibility: Bing is Doing it Wrong

Bing is my default search engine because, well, rewards. It's not the best search engine as such and I often end up wandering off elsewhere while researching to actually find what I'm looking for, but hey, it gives me stuff in return for using it. But in addition to not being the best search engine as such, Microsoft is now making it harder to use (if you want to participate in the rewards program). From a December 2 email:

On February 5th, Bing Rewards will no longer support Facebook as a sign-in option. To keep earning credits -- and get more ways to earn exclusive offers -- transfer to a Microsoft account.

This is exactly 180 degrees ass-backward from how things should be. Service login convergence is the order of the day. Users -- including me -- are getting more and more accustomed to being able to sign in pretty much anywhere using credentials from pretty much any major service (Facebook, Twitter, Google, et. al) via the 0Auth standard.

Presumably the purpose of Bing Rewards is to bring in new users and keep them there. Why would Microsoft go out of its way to make the program harder to enroll in, harder to log into, harder to benefit from?

It's. Just. Dumb.

An If-Then Statement

I do enough stuff around the web that some of it has to be automated. If it wasn't automated, it just wouldn't get done.

For example, maintaining the Facebook page and Twitter stream for Rational Review News Digest. We average about 50 posts per day, and as publisher I'm responsible not only for my own posts but for proofing and scheduling the other three editors' contributions. If I had to individually tweet and facething each post as it came out, there wouldn't be time in the day for anything else.

And while it wouldn't kill me to manually get the material here at KN@PPSTER out to the social networks, if I automate it I don't have to remember to do that every time.

And there's other stuff even more boring than the stuff I've already mentioned. So: Automation.

My two previous mainstays for getting that stuff done have been Networked Blogs and Twitterfeed.

They're both actually great services, but they also have various problems (Networked Blogs sometimes runs into problems "syndicating" my stuff; my Twitterfeed feeds seem to sometimes just go down without explanation for weeks at a time then suddenly start working again -- and to top it off, for a long time I couldn't figure out how to get into my account there because like an idiot I tied it to an "OpenID" sign-in powered by a site that then disappeared; finally figured out a workaround this morning).

So this morning I decided to just switch it all over to a newer service called IFTTT. The acronym stands for "if this, then that," and that's exactly how it works.

The user creates a "recipe" by choosing an "if this" and a "then that."

For example, "if I post something at my Blogger blog, then post a tweet on my Twitter account."

It's even simpler than it sounds.

Looks like about 110 different things on the web that you can do this with -- everything from Gmail to Blogger to Twitter to Facebook to YouTube to Dropbox to a gazillion things you may or may not have heard of or use.

You click on an "if then" icon (e.g. "Wordpress" -- it takes you through an authorization dialog for your Wordpress blog and what you want to trigger the if, e.g. "I post anything," "I post something with a particular tag," etc.).

Then you click on a "then that" (e.g. "Facebook Pages" -- it takes you through an authorization dialog for your Facebook page and what you want it to do (post the link/title/whatever from that Wordpress post to your Facebook page).

When you're happy you say so, and your "recipe" is active (unless you turn it off). Every 15 minutes from then on IFTTT checks to see if the "if this" has happened, and if so it automagically does the "then that" for you.

I've already got the RRND stuff working (it took about two minutes) ... this here blog post will tell me if I've got everything set up for KN@PPSTER automation (I don't doubt it -- like I said, IFTTT is easy as pie and hard to mess up -- but I still check, see?).

So anyway, if you're looking for easy, simple, reliable automation of Internet stuff, check out IFTTT. It rocks.

A New Commenting Conundrum

I had a note from a KN@PPSTER reader (and frequent commenter) this morning. She's attempting to escape the long arm of Google, and is now finding it difficult or impossible to comment on blogs.

Right now I'm using Disqus here, LiveFyre  at another blog (not yet ready for prime time, really), and IntenseDebate at RRND.

The would-be commenter informs me that both Disqus and LiveFyre (I don't know about IntenseDebate yet) require the user to "allow" Google, even if the user isn't attempting to sign in using a Google account -- or, for that matter, sign in at all.

Yes, that's right -- even if you comment as "guest," or use your Facebook, Twitter, etc. logins to connect, it still insists on pinging Google for some reason.

Does anyone know of a comment system (a "universal" one, not one internal to a specific site or site software type) that doesn't require you to slave your identity to Google? Personally, I don't mind affiliating with one of the Big Guys for ID purposes around the web, but some people do and I prefer to keep my blog accessible to them if I can.

When Facebook Hands You Lemons ...

... HootSuite makes for pretty good lemonade (yes, that is an affiliate link -- I get a commission if you decide to go with their "pro" options, which may be the case if you're all about analytics and such, or use your social networks in a team setting; I'm using the free version and it does what I need it to do).

So, have you been caught in Facebook's "Timeline" hell yet? I got sucked into it myself. Don't like it much. Prettier in some ways than the last iteration of Facebook, but also more complicated and apparently it zapped my existing display/privacy settings in favor of some random hash. And while I've found some theoretical ways of backing out and getting back to "Old Facebook," they're complicated and I can't seem to find the stuff they tell me to look for.

That's what pushed me to take a second look at HootSuite. I registered there awhile back and it looked pretty cool, but I usually don't adopt multi-tool "dashboards" without some kind of compelling reason. My Facebook profile suddenly and irreversibly looking like MySpace on a bad day is a compelling reason.

HootSuite lets you put all your social media streams on one page (and in one browser tab), organized the way you like, with internal (and very arrangeable/configurable) tabbing to keep things straight. You can post to any or all of those streams, and even schedule posts in advance.

Right now I've got Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn plugged into the dashboard. Very nice. I haven't used LinkedIn much before; maybe I will now that it's sort of in my face a bit. Everything's neat, organized, accessible. I can tell what's on my damn Facebook wall, which is nice. The main network that's missing (from my perspective) is Diaspora. A little Googling tells me that they're working on that.

Anyway, give it a try. If you use social networks very much, this will probably make it easier. If nothing else, you're not running three or more apps or browser tabs to keep up with the various sites.

[Update: Ooh, I just noticed another cool thing in Hootsuite. I can turn any Facebook thread into its own stream/tab, so that I don't have to hunt for it when I want to catch up with it a little later. That's nice - TLK]