If you are not already familiar with IFTTT, check it out, it's great service. The full name is If This Then That". So basically it will make something happen based on certain triggers. They have already lots of integrated services, like Google, Dropbox, Philips Hue, mobile phones, social media, email, etc.
The Steem blockchain should be integrated to IFTTT as a trigger service. Any kind of transaction in Steem blockchain could be used to make some kind of action to happen. Because witnesses publish a price feed, we can also get very easily the price of steem.
For example:
- if steem price goes up to 10 dollars, turn my lights green and blink them
- if @dan upvotes me, send push notification to my phone
- get email notification when somebody transfers money to my account
- get list of new articles in a certain category once a day
- publish my posts automatically in Twitter and Facebook
- if my witness starts to skip blocks, send me an SMS
I would definitely use it. Especially great would be to get notifications on certain kind of posts. For example, if somebody who I follow posts in a certain category, I want to get notified because it might be really interesting or important.
Notifications in Steemit.com are very limited for a poweruser so this would be very practical addition to infrastructure.
Apparently you need to be a partner if you want to publish a service in IFTTT. That costs 199 dollars per month, so it's not free. This could be funded by post rewards for the developer or maybe Steemit Inc could give some sponsorship.
Marketing perspective
IFTTT integration would be newsworthy because so far only Bitcoin is there (through Chain).
Most other blockchains wouldn't even have that many usecases in IFTTT because they have only currency transfers and prices. In addition to currency transfers, Steem has posts, comments, upvotes and downvotes, followers, etc. which are actually very practical triggers.
I think this would be a great way to demonstrate how useful Steem really is. IFTTT is widely used service, we would probably get a few new users from there.