All about IFTTT, aka If This, Then That

Transcript: Hi everyone, Erik Sebellin-Ross from CMD here. I'm going to tell you about the first really awesome web tool I've seen this year.

I've seen a lot of stuff, it's been more of the same...this has some more of the sameyness but it's got a degree of customization that's really sweet. It's called "If this, then that." Ifttt.com

It's kind of a syndication tool so you can take content from Facebook and have it show up on Twitter. But it's more flexible than those other tools because you can publish to SMS, craigslist, send emails, whatever. Another cool feature is that you can choose to be discriminate about what content gets syndicated. so, just tweets with certain hashtags...I'll show ya.

So first we're going to tell the service where to look for content. I'll go with a Facebook page. Most of the options you see, when you click them, you'll specify what the service will look at. For the Facebook page I'll tell it to look for status messages.

Sometimes there are fields to customize the trigger but in this case there aren't. So I'll click create trigger. Now we'll tell the service what action to take once it has found some new content.

In this case we'll be boring and we'll post to Twitter. Safe and easy. So how is this supposed to look? Is it posting a tweet based on the Facebook page post? Will it be an image? I don't know how that works considering we don't have an image...or post a new user to a list? Those don't make sense so we'll just post a new tweet.

Soon this page, the message in the curly braces...that's going to be the text from Facebook. It'll automatically be inserted inside there. If you want to add extra text, anything you type outside the braces will be the same every time. Why would you want to customize this? Maybe you want to give people context. So, "Posted from my Facebook page".

So we'll create the action. Describe it so it makes sense later. We'll create it and...we're done! Easy. But now we'll get more elaborate.

This time we'll look to Twitter. Look at all these options. Tons of possibilities. I'm going to look for a new tweet with a hashtag by me. What is that hashtag? #Testing!

Now what action should IFTTT take? I want it to post a note to my phone via SMS. In the curly braces, the text from the tweet goes to my phones. I'll add onto that by providing context by explaining where the message came from...and then a description...and viola! It's done.

So these are two relatively simple examples.

One quick note is that the service only looks for updates every 15 minutes. As far as I can tell that is not customizable. So if you post to Twitter, nothing will happen for 15 minutes.

You can also check the "recipes" section to see what other things people make. You can sort by popularity which is great. Lot of nice ideas in here.
This is an awesome service. It doesn't cost anything. It's really easy to use. I'd love to know how you used it and what you did, or if you didn't why you didn't. Leave a note in the comments, can't wait to read 'em.

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Science & Technology

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