My Birmingham City University colleague Nick Moreton has a neat little hack for connecting a JavaScript app to social media accounts by combining the automation tool IFTTT, and Google Drive. As he explains:

“Most of the big web apps provide their API in JSON format (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram) however, as you may know if you’ve ever tried to use these, they often require an OAuth login in order to access the API.”

IFTTT, you see, allows you to add a new row to a Google spreadsheet every time a particular criteria is met on, for example, Twitter (e.g. a particular account tweeting, or a hashtag being used). You only have to authorise IFTTT for the particular service once.

It is, basically, row-by-row scraping.

And any spreadsheet on Google Drive can be published as the JavaScript data format JSON.

Combine the two and you have a regularly updated live JSON feed from a social media service based on a criteria of your choosing.

You can read Nick’s post in full here.