Imagine the possibilities
According to its portfolio page, Chelsea based innovation lab betaworks has invested in IFTTT (If This Then That), a service that lets users program the web to work for them.
The investment was first noticed by Marshall Kirkpatrick with the help of the NeuVC bot.
The service takes the basic logic of computer programming and applies it to the numerous web apps people rely on every day.
So for example, I could set IFTTT to update me with a Tweet every time a certain VC posts an Instagram after 10pm on a weekday (good way to keep tabs on the dealflow).
Right now the service has 45 channels including foursquare, instapaper, readability and tumblr. For a company like betaworks, which prides itself on investing and building for the real time web, IFTTT present an interesting opportunity to see how these services can be leveraged against one another.
Some of the most popular recipes (strings of action) on IFTTT are based around exporting data from Facebook. Anil Dash has written that its important users preserve and protect the memories (data) they are posting to social networks, as many seemingly robust sites have quickly failed, taking users photos and text with them (RIP Friendster).
So it makes sens that the most popular recipe is an IFTTT that saves a Facebook photo to your Dropbox as soon as you are tagged. For the very popular among us, there is an IFTTT that greets new Twitter followers with an automatic response. And for those Americans out of work, there is a recipe that pings you with an email as soon as a new gig shows up on Craigslist.
Anyone make a cool IFTTT they want to share? Hit us in the comments.
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My favorite IFTTT is phone task that triggers at 7am everyday with an action “It’s time to stack the cheese” computer voice message. #awesome
From Chris Dixon on Twitter – “”When new Malcolm Gladwell article comes out, save it to Read it later” http://ifttt.com/recipes/10890″
Need a songsicle of this every morning: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=78hT0H8nt_E
i think you mean then not than. :/
I’m a big fan of this, but you can’t actually do the example cited in this story — “set IFTTT to update me with a Tweet every time a certain VC posts an Instagram after 10pm on a weekday.” The reason you can’t is that you can only set tasks that have to do with YOUR account, not with OTHER people’s accounts. I hope they update the service to allow this soon, at least including PUBLIC data when available.
Interesting. Let’s all hope they update the service to simply journalistic stalking the near future.
I dunno about Instagram, but you can do things like that with ifttt. I have ifttt sending me emails when certain accounts tweet, that include a copy of the tweet.
Looking closer, it looks like it will give you public data for Twitter and Craigslist. For every other service (including YouTube, Foursquare, Instagram, Flickr, Facebook, Tumblr, LinkedIn, Vimeo, etc.), it’s just personal actions that work.
Looking closer, it looks like it will give you public data for Twitter and Craigslist. For every other service (including YouTube, Foursquare, Instagram, Flickr, Facebook, Tumblr, LinkedIn, Vimeo, etc.), it’s just personal actions that work.