Between Facebook and email and Twitter and everything else, it can be hard to keep track of what's going on with your contacts — and that's what Triggerfox aims to fix.
Just updated to version 3.0, Triggerfox pulls in your streams from a variety of sources and lets you set which users you really want to get news about. The basis of Triggerfox is to cut out the clutter and get to updates from people you actually care about, no matter where that update is posted. But first you might be wondering just what services Triggerfox ties into. Here's a list:
AngelList, Facebook, Gmail, Google Contacts, iOS Calendar, iOS Contacts, LinkedIn, Outlook.com, and Twitter
Plenty of apps do the whole "many streams into one" thing, but what Triggerfox does is then break it out from there into streams based on the content, not the source. So you've got options like Meetings and Job Changes and Shared Articles and Life Events. It's less about where the news item comes from than what's in it.
Additionally, you can set up "VIP Alerts" — star up your combined contacts list with those you want more from and they'll be shuttled into the VIP Alerts section. Everybody you care about, nobody you don't (we all know we've got people in our Facebook list that we "have" to be friends with but can't stand). There's also the option to have keyword alerts — your name, where you work, and you on Twitter. Somebody mentions that in any of your streams, you get pinged. There's even a section for "In The News" where Triggerfox monitors news articles for mentions of your contacts.
To top it all off, you can perform many of the functions of the social networks right from the app. Reply to a tweet, like or comment on Facebook, send a canned email response to a LinkedIn post, etc. But let's say you don't have time for that right now — pull a post to the right and you get a "Follow Up" action, release and you're given the choices of "Tomorrow", "Next Week" and "Select Date" to set for an alert for you to check out that post at a later time. And if you tap on the "…" on any post or open a contact and hit the Actions button, you'll get a radial menu of all the various ways you can get in contact with them and even check out what follow up actions you've logged for that person.
For all the neat things and cool stuff that Triggerfox enables, there are some omissions here. For one, there's no way for you to post to any network — you can reply to other users, but you can't make your own posts. Perhaps that's not in the ethos of Triggerfox, but it seems weird to have all of your feeds coming into one spot but not be able to send anything out. Triggerfox is also missing integrations with popular social services like Google+ and Instagram. Yes, there's no proper API for those networks, but that's not stopped anybody else before. Also frustrating are the limitations on what you can send out. Want to send an email? You've got seven canned options, and you can only send that via the built-in iOS Mail app — even though Triggerfox integrates with the Gmail service it can't send you to the Gmail app.
Those limitations are only a few knocks on an otherwise relatively polished experience, and the sort of thing that can be addressed in future software updates. Triggerfox is all about bringing your contacts and their posts into one place, and in that regard it succeeds. It's not necessarily meant to be an all-in-one social network hub, though it's not too far off from that sort of holy grail if it really wanted to be.
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Disclosure: Mobile Nations, the parent company of iMore, is an investor in Triggerfox
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