ReadWriteWeb

Earlier today, my colleague John Paul Titlow posted a piece on comedian Louis CK's DIY efforts to shoot and publish a performance video online. You can also draw some parallels with those enterprise folks who are building their own apps. Now comes this study done for Intuit that is worth taking a look at.

Point and click web mashup startup ifttt ("if this then that") has raised financing from cutting-edge tech incubator Betaworks. News of the funding came to us via NeuVC's bot watching the firm's portfolio page, which is fitting given the nature of the startup.

ifttt allows anyone to set up a chain of conditional actions between a wide variety of web services, like "If I post a photo to Flickr, save it to my Dropbox." The company calls these "recipes." We wrote about the service when it launched to the public in September. Microsoft's Scott Hanselman also wrote up a nice review of the service and says "this is going to be huge." ifttt isn't just a single service, though, and it isn't even just an amalgamation of multiple services strung-together; it's a great example of a whole paradigm of DIY mashups. As Blogger and WordPress were to self-publishing and YouTube was to video publishing, so ifttt could be to working with interlinked web applications for everyday people. Can this startup herald a new era of lay hackers? The UI is good, the only question is whether there's really enough demand for such a service.

SublimeVideo, an HTML5-based video player from Switzerland-based development and design firm Jilion, has launched SublimeVideo.net, an HTML5 Video-Player-as-a-Service. The goal of the new site is to provide tools for Web publishers that will allow for the easy deployment of zero-maintenance HTML5 video on a website in a matter of seconds, and without the need to understand the complexities of the different Web browser versions and their various specifications.

Today Google launched "App Inventor," a do-it-yourself mobile app creation tool that lets anyone build their own Android applications without needing to know how to program or even write a line of code. Instead, using an online interface, would-be developers visually design the app's interface and interactions, using drag-and-drop blocks that specify what the app should look like and how it should behave.

Want your app to talk to Twitter? There's a button for that. Want your app to use text-to-speech? No problem. Use the GPS? Piece of cake. Or so says Google, who had tested the app for a year prior to launch with groups that included "sixth graders, high school girls, nursing students and university undergrads who are not computer science majors," reports The New York Times, who broke the story this morning.

Forget building your own iPhone app, you can now build your own mobile social network! Two companies - Shoutem and Socialight - are offering platforms that allow anyone to design, develop and launch their very own social networks for mobile devices. Although neither service will likely lead to the next creation of the next Twitter or Foursquare, the tools they offer are perfect for design a niche site for a select group of users. Whether it's a closed network for you and your friends, a fan-based network for celebrating a favorite TV show, a one-time use network for a particular conference or event or even something designed for use within a particular company, these services have you covered.

It's been almost a year since I last worked with DIY repair site FixYa but I still remember the traffic spike we'd see every Christmas. While families would be thrilled to unwrap smart phones, netbooks and flat screen monitors in the early morning, they'd find themselves lost in a sea of instructions by noon. There is nothing worse than having a new shiny toy and not being able to play with it. In addition to FixYa, below are a few resources you can use to help set up your new gadgets.

At this point, most programmers have already heard about StackOverflow. First started last year by celebrity coders Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood, coding Q&A site StackOverflow crowdsources programming solutions for all to see. The site is popular for its Digg-like voting interface, clean design and, of course, its useful information. The duo has since begun licensing the software behind StackOverflow to provide companies with customizable Q&A forums on a number of topics.

Have you ever wanted to build a better web cam, GPS device or web video pet monitoring service? Well you just might get your chance. Bug Labs recently released their latest BUGbase device module with an embedded WiFi and bluetooth solution. Best known for its Lego-like hardware blocks, BUG offers users a set of programmable modules to develop DIY gadgets. What makes this so groundbreaking is the fact that the company is offering one of the first-ever open source WiFi hardware solutions. This means that both large-scale hardware manufacturers and garage tinkers can utilize the code.

Toonlet is a new site where you can create your own cartoon strips with customized characters and leave cartoons as comments in response to other peoples' strips. It's fun, fast and easy. Kids will like it and I do too.

There's lots of sites on the web where you can create your own comic strips but few of them let you build your own characters. On Toonlet there are seven collections of resizable body parts you can mix and match, including one contributed by comic rock-star Peter Bagge, author of the 90's best seller Hate.