It’s New Tool Tuesday!
And today, I’m featuring IFTTT, which stands for “If This Then That.” Funny name. Cool idea.
It allows you to set up a workflow — if you do action X, action Y will automatically follow.
I do feel like I need to stress again that I don’t like social media automation, but I do appreciate efficiency. So if I would already do the following:
example: I’m tagged in a photo on Facebook
- Action X: save the photo to my desktop
- Action Y: upload the photo to Flickr
I can set up a “recipe” to do all of that automatically.
And because there are so many channels to choose from:
You can get really creative.
Want to automatically post links that you share in Google Reader to Twitter? Easy. Want to automatically post YouTube videos that you like on your Tumblr feed? Cinch. Want to get a text when it’s about to rain? Money.
And because you can turn on/off recipes at any time, you can have situational workflows.
For example — I’m pre-writing a series of Blog Homework posts to cover myself during an upcoming vacation. I have a plugin that posts the link to Twitter as soon as it’s published, but I’ve never found one that works well for sharing on Facebook.
Enter IFTTT.
It’s not a perfect solution — but nothing automated is. I think that IFTTT can be a great way to take the work out of some pretty mundane activities.
The popular recipes are fun to browse, and it might give you some ideas of recipes of your own.
If you want to try it out, you should be able to sign up. If you need an invite, let me know and I’ll send you one!
About Katy
This one sounds awesome- I’m not a fan of automation either, but it looks like there could be some really cool ones that aren’t necessarily social media, like saving to your calendar or automatically backing up in dropbox, etc. Anything that saves a click or two is pretty useful!
Heather @ Side of Sneakers recently posted..Breakfast for a Week in 10 Minutes or Less
That sounds pretty cool! I’ll have to check that out and see if there is anything that would be really useful for me. Thank you for sharing! Also, as for facebook- I use networked blogs and that usually posts them right after my post is published!
Lindsay@ In Sweetness and In Health recently posted..Supersets and Chicken for One
AH! Thanks for sharing!
I think this will help me out a lot.
maria @ Chasing the Now recently posted..Vegetarian to Flexitarian
AAAA this is AWESOME. I have been trying to get my blog posts onto my personal facebook page forEVS, and to have a better blog-twitter link. I think I’ve found my solution!!
Deva @ Devy by Definition recently posted..Weekend Recap
Very cool!
I’m actually a big fan of automation, when it works properly. If there’s one thing I hate, it’s having to check my Facebook accounts to see that my feeds went through properly (and often they don’t!).
Going to check out this site now and look into signing up. Thanks, Katy!
Lisa Fine recently posted..It’s Not Officially Autumn Without an Indian Summer
This is really interesting. I also read an article on the New York Times tech blog about different ways you use IFTTT. Will need to join and play around with it.
Din recently posted..Half Marathon Training Week Eight In Review
Wow this post takes me back to the days when I was a computer science tutor. Love it when you introduced new things on your blog though!