IFTTT (If That Then This) is a new free web service that lets you automate your online life. You can connect with 50+ online services and set them up to conditionally react with each other. IFTTT calls these conditional reactions recipes.
Some people share recipes through IFTTT’s built-in option to share recipes. Users have already created over 2.5 million recipes.AllThingsD The service makes it easy to do things like have all the photos you are tagged in automatically uploaded to Dropbox, get a text message when snow is on the way, or even use Siri to turn your lights on and off (you will need a Belkin Wemo Switch for that last one).
IFTTT lets you take advantage of a new era of APIs and Web 2.0 services using an easy-to-use interface that is not only intuitive but powerful too. Is it the best website for personal automation? Yes. And can it help you automate your online life? Certainly. To top it off, IFTTT recently raised $7M so they can afford do things like give you a free phone number to use with your connected services.PandoDaily
Services IFTTT Connects With
- Dropbox
- Text Messaging
- Vimeo
- Many more (IFTTT Channel page)
How to Create Your Own Recipe in Under a Minute
We hate being repetitive but we can not stress enough how easy this website makes automating your online life. After you create an account, go to create and IFTTT will guide you through the process. They make it so easy a fifth-grader can do it. Regardless, we would like to show you exactly how easy they make it. They break it down into 7 easy steps but we break it down into a few more to illustrate exactly how recipes are created. In this example, we will be creating a recipe that saves Facebook photo uploads on Dropbox.
Step 1: Click Create, Click This
“This” is the service that will trigger something else to happen with another service. In other words, “This” is where you tell IFTTT when to do something.
Step 2: Select the Trigger Service
Step 3: Connect the Service
Step 4: Choose the Trigger Action
Step 5: Confirm the Trigger
Step 6: Click That
“That” is the action that IFTTT automates. If you want IFTTT to upload a photo to Facebook everytime you upload a photo to Instagram then uploading a photo to Facebook is “That”.
Step 7: Choose the Action Service
Step 8: Choose the Action
Step 9: Fill in the Details
This is where things get interesting. You can tell IFTTT exactly what you want to happen. By default, IFTTT fills in the details for what most people will want the service to do. However, IFTTT makes it easy to create elaborate trigger schemes using ingredients. Ingredients are aspects of the services that you can control. For instance, Facebook users can grab photos, captions, profile details, and anything that the Facebook API allows the service to grab. These ingredients are conditionally generated based on what is relevant to the trigger you are creating.
Step 10: Name it and Finalize it
If that’s not easy enough for you, you can just use our recipe. You will just have to sign up at IFTTT and connect your Facebook and Dropbox accounts. Alternatively, you can also browse through the entire collection of recipes shared at IFTTT.
Top 10 IFTTT Recipes
This list is not meant to be a comprehensive list of the best IFTTT recipes. It is meant to give you an idea of what IFTTT is capable of and highlight some of the recipes we found most interesting. Remember, making your own recipes is ridiculously easy! And without further ado, here is our list of the top 10 IFTTT recipes that will help you automate your online life:
- Send yourself an e-mail and have your phone ring
- Put Instagram photos in a Facebook album titled “Instagram”
- Download and save all Facebook tagged photos to Dropbox
- Schedule Facebook posts using Google Calendar
- E-mail IFTTT with a file URL and download it to Dropbox
- Automatic posting from WordPress to LinkedIn
- Get an e-mail when a new book is added to Amazon’s Top 100 Free Books list
- Get a text when snow is on the way
- Turn your lights on via text message
- Send all your Instagram photos to Tumblr
Endless Possibilities for Automating your Online Life
The possibilities are practically limitless! Keep your eyes on this service. With its recent investment of $7M, we can safely say many improvements are on the way. As the service adds more and more channels it will become way more powerful.
If you are looking to take things a step further we recommend you check out iMacros which is the leading browser automation software. Using iMacros is not as easy but with the added difficulty comes much more power to automate your online life.
