A quick overview of IFTTT

I've just be made aware of IFTTT (pronounced Lift but without the L) which is a system that let you connect various social media channels in order to perform automatic actions on a channel based on activity on another channel.

An example of how useful this system could be is this very blog post. It is part of my #WeeklyBlogClub blogs. Therefore once I've uploaded it via blogger I will send a tweet to inform the other blog club bloggers that it exists. Also, I want my work colleagues to see it as I feel they would be interested in at least knowing about this system, even if they don't go on to use it themselves. This will mean possibly sending them an e-mail. Wouldn't it be good if a tweet and email send automatically once I uploaded the blog? Well that is exactly what I've set up via IFTTT. An automatic tweet and automatic e-mail. The former triggered by the use of the label #weeklyblogclub on the blog and the latter by the use of the label #work. I'll let you know if it all worked OK later, but first of all here is a quick overview of IFTTT.

Currently IFTTT has 47 Social Media channels available to it, including Bitly, Blogger, Craigslist, Date & Time, Delicious, Email, Facebook, Facebook Pages, Feed (RSS), Flickr, Foursquare, Gmail, Google Calendar/Reader/Talk, Lastfm, LinkedIn, Phone Call, Twitter, Weather and Wordpress

To connect the channels together involves the creations of what the system calls recipes. Each recipe is in the following format

If {{THIS}} then {{that}}

The {{THIS}} part of the recipe is the trigger which actives the recipe. E.g. I'm tagged in a photo on Facebook or I posted a Tweet on Twitter using the hash tag #event

The {{THAT}} part of the recipe is the action you want the system to perform. E.g. send me a text or add the event to my Google Calendar.

Examples of complete recipes

If {{I upload a photo onto FlickR}} then {{post a tweet with the title and url of that image with a short message}}

If {{Bournemouth Town Hall is mentioned on Craigslist}} then {{send me an email}}

If {{it is Monday}} then {{send an email to my staff to remind them to do their timesheets for the previous week }}

Recipes can be turned off and on as necessary and are usually checked for new triggers every 15 minutes. Also you can share a recipe and there are hundreds already created for people to customise and use. Though the interface to create the recipes is very simple to use.

So I hope this gives a very quick insight into IFTTT. I’ll let you know how I get on. Of course one major disadvantage with it is that to use the Facebook / Blogger / Gmail etc you do have to authorise IFTTT to use your accounts for those channels, but you can only authorise the channels you want IFTTT to use, not all of them at once.

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hmmm having posted this blog yesterday I can defiantly say that the system didn't work. I haven't received an e-mail nor was the tweet sent. Disappointing, I don't know if it was me or not. I'll have a look into it next week. Sorry folks.

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