IFTTT
My tweeting frequency has declined ever since I started using Google+. Earlier I used Twitter for sharing publicly and email for sharing privately. Google+ gave me a single tool to do both. PS: I don’t post on Facebook.
Google+ seemed like a good solution at first, but it also posed a problem of posting on both Google+ and Twitter. I couldn't cross post my public updates from Twitter<->Google+. I found myself posting the same update twice on both networks. My search for a good solution ended with IFTTT.
What is IFTTT
IFTTT (pronounced gift, minus the g) stands for If This Then That. IFTTT’s mission is simple and elegant — “ Put the internet
to work for you”.
Simply put, a Recipe (IFTTT) = Trigger (this) + Action (that).
A few examples of triggers are “I’m tagged in a photo on Facebook” or “I check in on Foursquare”. A few examples of actions are “send me a text message” or “create a status message on Facebook”. Pieces of data from a trigger are ingredients. For example, the ingredients of an email trigger could be: subject, body, attachment, received date, and the sender’s address. IFTTT lets users creates thousands of combinations of recipes (triggers based actions) between different kinds of channels such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Dropbox, Instagram, iOS Photos, Foursquare, Gmail, Google Calendar etc. For unsupported channels, such as Google+, there are RSS-based recipes that anyone can use.
A few of of my favorite recipes
Why is IFTTT really cool?
IFTTT stitches together the different services that constitute the internet. As these services become more and more pervasive, smartphone and tablet devices are quickly becoming nothing more than different modes or form factors of consumption of these internet services. With software eating the world and the advent of ‘internet of things’, it becomes increasingly important for the disparate services and devices to work well together. Andreesen Horowitz, one of the most powerful VC firms in Silicon Valley, is at the forefront of investing in ‘internet of things’ start-ups. In my belief, Andreesen Horowitz has invested in IFTTT because it views IFTTT as the glue that makes the services of its portfolio companies sticky and work well together.
The idea behind IFTTT is not revolutionary and it is not the first time that somebody has tried to solve this problem. The beauty of IFTTT lies in its thoughtful and elegant design. It makes alternative cross-posting solutions clunky, complicated and unreliable.
IFTTT minimizes complexity. Its minimalist design effectively removes the product out of the user’s way and lets users focus on what they want to do. IFTTT’s design cred is rooted in its co-founder Linden Tibbets, who worked at IDEO for three years before starting up IFTTT.
What’s next?
IFTTT was recently made available as an app on iPhone. The app enables recipes around the things you do on the go: snapping screenshots, adding new contacts, completing reminders, and organizing photo albums.
IFTTT continues to expand its channel integration with more providers and make its recipes richer by enhancing ingredients of existing triggers. Thus users continue to get new and more value from IFTTT on an on-going basis.
Being the versatile tool that it is, IFTTT continues to be used in creatively productive ways such as an SEO tool, social media marketing, tracking and alerting, workflow automation and drive traffic to websites. In future, I expect IFTTT to add a few more apps for important platforms such as Android and Windows. I would also like to see it integrate with services such as Amazon, Goodreads and Netflix. In my opinion, there is no end to powerful IFTTT recipes that one could imagine to make different internet services work together. I would like to see IFTTT, often described as the ‘digital duct tape’, become more powerful and all-encompassing in future.
Citation: All images used in this post are sourced from IFTTT website.
