How I use ifttt
I’ve been having a ton of fun lately playing with ifttt, a service that lets you easily glue together different web services you use / rely on every day. If you remember Yahoo Pipes (wiki), ifttt is based off the same ideas - but is much easier to approach, think about, and use. There are a couple of other ifttt flow blog posts around, but my favorite blog entries are the ones that show instead of tell - so, here we go:
ifttt tasks, as of 5/31/2011
The favorite use I found for it so far is my Game of Thrones task - I love The Atlantic’s coverage but really couldn’t care less about their other Entertainment articles, and they don’t have category-specific RSS feeds. This way, I get things delivered straight to my inbox!
And, in the interest of keeping my inbox relevant, I have higher-frequency / immediate-action-required tasks tied to my GTalk, which makes sure that I can react quickly.
(I’ve noticed that more of my tasks are tied around consumption/notification rather than production. The other blog posts I’ve linked to above seem to tend toward duplicating/publishing content elsewhere, which is an interesting difference.)
The site is really nicely designed and is genuinely fun to use. Get on the invite list and start creating - I’m excited to see what other fun uses I find.
Note: Hah, if you look closely, my Rent reminder, the second task from the bottom has never fired. Clearly, the service is still in beta. I still use Resnooze for scheduled email reminders about things, but am looking forward to ifttt stabilizing enough for me to switch!
Let me know what you think on Twitter.