Interconnection of Gmail, Twitter, Facebook, Evernote, Dropbox and other web services through the ifttt.com mashup

Get rid of unnecessary intermediate steps to save time

By analyzing workflows, you can discover new ideas for increasing productivity. If you break the process down into parts, you will see weak links that need to be removed or changed.

Let's say you use Dropbox as a single repository for all the files you receive or send to others. You receive an email with a file attached and you want to send it to Dropbox. To do this, you need to perform a number of actions: launch Dropbox, open an email, save the attached file on your hard drive in the Dropbox folder. There are two key events in this micro-process: the receipt of the letter and the posting of the file to Dropbox. All other manipulations are intermediate actions that take away such precious minutes for busy people.

The workflow consists of hundreds of similar micro-processes with intermediate actions that require a total of tens of minutes every day. Imagine how convenient it would be to delegate these intermediate tasks to someone and get a ready-made result of the microprocess.

When using web services, a person acts as an intermediary between them. Keep in mind, however, that many web services have open APIs and, as a result, can interact with each other directly. There are mashups - services that allow you to combine data from other services to achieve the desired result.

One such tool is ifttt, which is in beta testing. With its help, you can chain events in different services, get rid of intermediate actions in order to concentrate on the key ones. The ifttt service resembles the famous game "Alchemy" - it creates combinations of services to perform important tasks.

If it happened in one service, it will happen in another service

The formula for this service is encrypted in its name. IFTTT is an abbreviation for “If this then that”. The ifttt mashup allows you to establish a causal relationship between events in different services according to the principle "If it happened in one service, it will happen in another service."

According to ifttt terminology, “this” (cause event) is called a trigger, “then” (consequence event) is called an action, a rule created by a formula is called a task, and the supported services (and some other data sources, about which below) - channels (channel).

When you create a new task, the screen displays the “If this then that” formula. The required variables are substituted for this and that. By clicking on this, you need to select the service in which the cause event will be monitored from the list of channels that appears, and determine which event it is. Similarly (after clicking on that), settings are specified for another service, in which the effect of the cause event will occur.

Ifttt supports 21 web services and a number of other data sources (date and time, letter to a special ifttt email address, message to ifttt bot in Google Talk, RSS feeds, phone call, SMS, and even weather information for a given territory). Dozens of cause and effect combinations can be built from these services and data sources.

Let's take a Gmail feed as an example. Three triggers are offered for it: receiving a letter from an address, a letter with a specified label, and a letter containing the desired keywords in the subject or body. Any of these events can be defined in ifttt as the cause of a consequence event in another service. The Gmail channel supports one action as a consequence of causal events in other services - sending a letter to the desired address.

The finished task looks like this.

Currently, ifttt allows a maximum of 10 tasks to be executed simultaneously (it is allowed to create any number of tasks, but no more than 10 of them must be activated at any given time). This limitation is presumably connected with the intention of developers in the future to monetize the service on the Freemium model, offering more functions for a fee, or with the fact that the service is in beta stage and it is required to curb user activity for technical reasons.

There are many uses for ifttt. Here is some of them:

receiving SMS notifications about tweets you are interested in, Facebook updates, emails that meet certain parameters, posts in RSS feeds on a given topic, and other updates from various services;
import of all RSS feed updates or selected by keywords in Evernote, Instapaper and Read It Later;
fast sending of files attached to letters to the specified Dropbox folder;
scheduling events in various services for a specific date and time;
publishing posts in WordPress, Posterous, Tumblr via SMS;
create audio notes in Evernote by sending a letter with an attached audio file.

It should be noted that Cyrillic characters are not displayed in incoming SMS messages. I informed the developers about this - I hope the problem will be solved soon.

Conclusion

With knowledge of the functions of various services and a fair amount of ingenuity, you can create amazing combinations of triggers and actions and get results that look like magic. Ifttt's simple and ingenious mashup demonstrates the power of modern technologies and open systems that can interact synergistically with each other.

Let this service not only increase your productivity, but also become a training in the ability to find unexpected relationships between objects and phenomena, let it make you think about the importance of analyzing work processes in order to achieve greater efficiency.