IFTTT: Marrying FB, Twitter, Google, Dropbox and your phone

Ever wished there was an easy way to download tagged photos on Facebook to Dropbox? Get a text from your Google Calendar when an event is about to start? Or send your Google Reader starred items to Evernote? Until recently, it was possible to tie together some services, such as Twitter and Facebook, but to connect all your web services together was a challenging task, to say the least.

Ifttt.com changes all that. Standing for “If this then that”, Ifttt allows you to specify tasks and triggers which automate connections between different apps and services. For example, a ’task’ may be to save a URL from one of your Tweets to Delicious; the ’trigger’ is to send a tweet with a specified hashtag in it. Once the trigger and task are set up, the rest is automated. From then on, every time you send a Tweet with the right hashtag, the first link it contains will get saved to Delicious.

Although only 35 different services are currently supported, that does include the biggies like Twitter, Tumblr, YouTube, Facebook, Flickr and most of Google’s tools. There’s even a stock market channel, which will trigger either when stock prices for a particular ticker symbol rise above or fall below a limit you specify. Undoubtedly the selection will grow with time.

Ifttt was launched in a private beta last December. In his introductory blog post , developer Linden Tibbets described Iftt as “digital duct tape if you will, allowing you to connect any two services together. […> Much like in the physical world when a 12 year old wants a lightsaber, cuts the handle off an old broom and shoves a bike grip on the other end, you can take two things in the digital world and combine them in ways the original creators never imagined.”

Although it focuses on very simple “if this then that” tasks, it’s possible to string these together to achieve quite complex tasks. Twitter user @UncleWilco runs ReadersSheds , a website about garden sheds. He gets an email every time a member of the sheddie community posts new pictures to the site. Iftt then automatically turns that into a tweet which is sent out via @readersheds with a link to the new content .

Twitter user Heather Taylor sends all her tweeted links to Delicious and all her Instagram pictures to Flickr. And Rishi Dastidar uses it to email him when he is tagged in a Facebook photo. As he says , all you have to do is “Set stuff up then forget it.”

And if you don’t want to think too hard about if which then what, there are plenty of ‘recipes’, connections that other users have created, which you can simply copy.

One of the limitations I’ve found is that it’s hard to set up one-off tasks. You can, of course, set up a task, let it trigger and then delete it, but that’s a bit of a tedious work around. Ifttt tasks are run every 15 minutes, so when testing things out it is a bit tedious to wait, but as Iftt is supposed to run quietly in the background, once you’ve got it doing what you want, you won’t even notice the delay.

Even with these minor issues, Ifttt has, in the space of the last two hours, become very useful to me. I haven’t used my personal Delicious account in two years because of the terrible state of Delicious browser plug-ins, but now that I can easily push from Twitter to Delicious and from Delicious to Instapaper, I’m set!