Thursday, November 10, 2011

ifttt - If This Then That

ifttt is a really nifty site for web-service scripting using simple conditionals. With ifttt it's possible to do things like  sending all your starred Google Reader posts to Read It Later, saving all Facebook photos where you are tagged to Dropbox and send you an SMS to remind you to buy some cold beer if the temperature is above 30 degrees Celsius.

It is really easy to create your own scripted tasks. You chose a Trigger Channel, a Trigger, an Action Channel and an Action. A channel can be anything from Facebook, Twitter, Weather, RSS, LinkedIn, flickr, Gmail, Dropbox to YouTube or SoundCloud.

Available Triggers depend on the Trigger Channel. For Facebook it could be "New Facebook status message by you", for Gmail "New email from a specific address" and for Dropbox "New file added to public folder".

As with Triggers the available Actions depend on the Action Channel. For Gmail there's an action to "Send an e-mail" and for Dropbox "Save file from URL". The input data for the action can be taken from the Trigger, be it the e-mail subject or the Facebook status message.

You are also able to share your tasks with other users. When you share a task it becomes known as a Recipe. Before creating your own task make sure to check the list of recipes as chances are high that someone has already made a recipe for it.

I've started using ifttt myself to propagate all Dweller related blog posts to the Dweller Facebook page. Now that the Google+ API has been released I sure hope there will be a Google+ channel as well so I can get Dweller posts automatically put up on G+ as well.

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