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How To Use IFTTT (And Why You Might Want To)

September 14, 2011, 8:00 am

By George Williams

Okay, so ifttt.com (the acronym stands for if this then that) was founded with the idea that “the key to unlocking the creative potential of our existing digital tools might be to build a service that simplifies and consolidates the way those tools can be connected.” Consider how many different web-based tools we’ve covered here at ProfHacker, tools like Delicious, Dropbox, Evernote, Facebook, Flickr, Google+, Google Calendar, Google Reader, Google Voice, Read It Later, Twitter… And beyond what we’ve covered there are many such tools out there available for your use. Imagine if you could instruct those services to interact with each other automatically under certain conditions.

With if this then that you can “duct tape” (their description) different services together, as in these examples:

  • if you favorite a Tweet with a link then your Delicious account adds a bookmark for that link
  • if it’s going to rain then you receive a text message letting you know
  • if you receive an email with an attached file then that file is automatically downloaded to your Dropbox folder
  • If you star an item in Google Reader then that item is sent to your Read It Later account
  • if you upload a video to your YouTube account then that video is automatically published on your WordPress site

The site currently works with 35 “channels,” a term it uses to describe the various online services. Once you’ve authorized ifttt to access your account with one of these channels, it’s a fairly simple process to create a recipe for a “task” like the examples above. And if you’d like to check out recipes created by other ifttt users, there’s a sortable page available for your perusal.

I can imagine many useful applications of ifttt, but I’ve only been playing around with it for a day or so. How about you? Have you given it a try? What “recipes” are most interesting to you? What are some of the processes in your workflow that would benefit from automation like this? Please let us know in the comments.

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  • http://www.briancroxall.net Brian Croxall

    Thanks for covering this, George. In many ways it reminds me of Yahoo! Pipes except that instead of working with RSS feeds it works with entire web services. I’m going to have to find some time to start working on ifttt cocktails.

  • prorabaugh

    I became enamored with this site yesterday, and sent the link via Twitter to my students (we are studying web habits and activities). However, I have started to worry about how quickly we are willing to give our usernames and passwords to services like these (to Tweet Deck, for example, to pull my Twitter data or to sites asking for my Google login info).  At some tipping point, we will all start reading Terms/Conditions really closely, but that has not happened yet.

  • http://ProfHacker.com George H. Williams

    Yes, it’s definitely similar to Yahoo! Pipes but much easier to use.

  • http://ProfHacker.com George H. Williams

    Yes, as we have written before, it’s always important to keep stability and security in mind when using online services.

    What I’m more interested in hearing about in the comments section to this post, however, are ideas from ProfHacker readers about ifttt recipes that might benefit an academic workflow.

  • http://sarahwerner.net Sarah Werner

    It’s not an exciting use, but it should be hugely helpful for me: My one and only task so far is to send favorited tweets to Instapaper–this puts not only the link in Instapaper, but also a summary with the text of the tweet and the user who sent it. Since I read a lot of twitter on my Android phone, which doesn’t support Instapaper, this gives me a super easy way to follow up on interesting looking pieces that I don’t want to read online on my phone. (Before I used to favorite the tweet, then try to remember to go back when I was at my computer and open them all up to Instapaper them. This would be one reason why I have a huge number of favorited tweets. Too many to ever, in fact, look at.)

    If I could now get from Instapaper to Zotero, my life would be perfect.

    I suspect I’ll find more uses that will be helpful, but I’ve really barely had a chance to look at it!

  • ajlyon

    When I heard about this yesterday, I was a little disappointed to see that they don’t have a mechanism for adding more channels at this time. It’d probably be pretty straightforward to add a Zotero channel, so you could link Instapaper and Zotero. As it is, it’s possible, but you’d still need a piece of glue like a home-grown ifttt to do it.

  • AlexHalavais

    I was initially excited by the service, but I just haven’t found a need for it yet. (I signed up in beta, but the farthest I got was to have it send me an email and remind me to wear shorts when the temperature is high enough.) But I am really happy it exists, and plan to have students work on a creative use of it.

  • kaitlinwalsh

    George, this is so awesome.  I’m trying some of the recipes that send tagged photos from my Facebook to my Dropbox or Flickr.  I’m also doing something I’ve wanted to do for a long time:  having my Facebook status update my Twitter, rather than the other way around.  Thanks for sharing it!

  • netdivaweb

    “if you receive an email with an attached file then that file is automatically downloaded to your Dropbox folder”

    As near as I can tell, you cannot do the above.  The dropbox task only lets one get a file from URL and have that appear in Dropbox.

  • http://ProfHacker.com George H. Williams
  • netdivaweb

    well thank you for this.  the writeup on the site makes the dropbox plugin sound like it cannot do this.

  • http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=653500959 Mies Martin

    Would love to see a way of connecting with Zotero.  I’m just now giving Instapaper a test run to see how that might fit into a workflow.

  • http://www.eztv.it/ SantaBJ

    IFTT is excellent, but it has a couple of pitfalls that should be known to programmers. You are limited to one “if” – so you have to be careful with things like crossposting. For example, I have Youtube set to post videos that I “Like” to both Facebook and Twitter, and I had set IFTT to post links I post to Twitter on Facebook and vice versa (which in itself leads to trouble; more on that soon). The result? Youtube posts to Twitter and Facebook, and those posts trigger iftt to throw them  from T to F and vice versa. Those will again count as new links and here we go – infinite loop. 

    Of course, just setting Facebook to crosspost to Twitter *and* vice versa will cause the same infinite loop problem. You have to be careful that you make this whole thing one-way and you need to limit inputs. It can get messy.

    I wish it had some internal checks that could be set as rules in the recipes, like “if link already exists on Facebook, don’t crosspost from Twitter” and “if IFTT has already crossposted this item once, don’t do it again”.

  • http://www.owenmarcus.com Owen Marcus

    I just set up my blog post to feed to Google+… I’ll see how well it works.

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