Buffer overflows and collapses

As a keen social media citizen I have been using social sharing Buffer service free account quite happily for many months. I routed information gems to Buffer mainly from my preferred Feedly RSS aggregator and news reading service. At convenient scheduled times Buffer releases these updates to my Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+ CloudScholar page. My tweets are automatically repeated on my Facebook news stream for my diminishing friends list on that service.

Suddenly last week Buffer started sending unsubtle messages:

You've completely filled the buffer for the individual plan, nice work! Upgrading to Awesome gets you more space...

So no more buffering for me as I can't possibly justify paying US$102/year for their 'awesome' service. I realise they operate a freemium business model but just terminating the free service after a fixed number of updates seems severe. I won't have started using Buffer had I known this limitation at the start.

Fortunately the currently free IFTTT service glues together much of the world's social media services. As it has done for several of my acquaintances IFTTT has provided a reasonably smooth equivalent to my lost Buffer service. Using an IFTTT recipe that repeats any of my tweets with a chosen hashtag, #cast in my case, to LinkedIn. I now have Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook covered. Feedly provides the same quick link to generate tweets as it did for Buffer so convenience is not sacrificed.

I have admit that so far IFTTT has not been able to send a tweet to my Google+ Cloudscholar page. If anyone knows how to achieve this please comment below.

Overall I am quite happy with my switch to IFTTT.