Remember Yahoo! Pipes? If This, Then That is what Yahoo! Pipes could have been if Yahoo! had paid any attention at all to Pipes’ usability. Basically, it lets you mix and match actions on 40 different web-based services so that if something the user designates happens on one service, IFTTT carries out a task on another service.
For example, I have authorized IFTTT to access both my Twitter account and my Diigo account. I have then set up a task so that every time I mark a tweet as a Favorite, any link mentioned on the tweet automatically gets added to my Diigo bookmark. I have done the same thing with Google Reader so that every story I mark as starred gets added to Diigo as well.
I’ve currently got 18 different tasks defined in IFTTT. One thing I really appreciate about the service is its ability to send SMSes and emails based on triggers. This can be everything from straightforward reminders — I have one that texts me every day to remind me to take my medicine at the appointed time — to monitoring my Gmail and texting me whenever an email with a specific subject line shows up.
IFTTT is a great start, but it does have a few drawbacks. The first is that while 40 web-based services is quite a few, obviously there are dozens more than I wished it supported.
For some services IFTTT really needs to let me set up multiple accounts. IFTTT lets me connect my Tumblr and WordPress blogs to its system so that I could, for example, automatically have any post I make on Tumblr automatically posted to WordPress.
That’s great, except that I’m limited to just one WordPress blog (and one Tumblr as well). So I’d like my Tumblr posts added to one WordPress blog and my Tweets added to another. On IFTTT, at the moment, you just can’t do that.
The interactions with the services’ APIs are also fairly limited in many cases. For example, I can set up an IFTTT task to text or email or tweet when a file shows up in my Dropbox public folder, but I can’t tell it to do so when a file is added to any arbitrary Dropbox folder which is less-than-useful.
A similar service, Dropbox Automator, takes care of this problem … at least for Dropbox. I’m using a web service that automatically backs up its data file to Dropbox every morning, and there’s no way in hell I’d want that file in my public folder.
With Dropbox Automator, I can set up a task so that as soon as that file gets added to my Dropbox it gets emailed as an attachment and then added to a /Processed/ subfolder that I delete every so often.
Hopefully IFTTT will more fully exploit the Dropbox API (and other services’ APIs) more thoroughly in the future to allow that level of interaction.
Until then, though, IFTTT and Dropbox Automator make an excellent — and free — combination to intelligently combine different web services.
Created with WorkFlowy.com
Last night I bought an XBOX 360, mostly for streaming video from my basement server to my living room (plus the upcoming stream Netflix to XBOX upgrade). I also threw in a few games, though I’m not a big fan of console games.