Sharing a couple ways I am using ifttt to route things through the web.

Following up from a recent letter about cool email and productivity tools I’ve been using lately *, I wanted to add to that and share a couple link hacks I’ve been playing with lately.

Gautam was the first one to tell me about ifttt, a geeky and pretty powerful service for routing things through web services. ifttt suffers a bit from the blank slate problem: given a big white space, what do you do to fill it in?

Thankfully, they offer a suite of sample ways to use it, but here’s a couple ways I’ve been using it:

Saving links: I used delicious a long time ago, and have nearly 5,000 links in the service. Discarded for other services after delicious was essentially abandoned, I’ve started using it again after the relaunch, aided by the fact that one service I had started to use, trunk.ly, was recently bought by delicious. One of my favorite parts about trunk.ly was how it automatically collected links from things you shared via Twitter, Tumblr, or your blog. Link your services to trunkly, and it would scan what you favorited, tweeted, shared, or linked to, and it would collect the links. Since trunkly is due to get shut down, I recreated the same functions into delicious using ifttt, automatically creating links in delicious from things I tweet, favorited, and liked. Simple and easy way to automatically capture links, and makes it easy to find. **

Sharing links: I used to use Google Reader’s “Share” function to tweet links via Twitterfeed, but since Google removed the functionality (the RSS feed still remains, but the Share function is gone and the feed is no longer promoted), I’ve recreated the function using ifttt. Once I star an item, it is sent to Buffer, where the item is then tweeted by title + link on a time schedule I’ve set in Buffer.

Storing photos: I also created an ifttt to store Foursquare photos into Flickr; I’ve been doing that perfectly fine for awhile using Flicksquare, but am testing the same function using ifttt.

But it’s important to note that ifttt isn’t just about links: there are a wide range of ways to use it to route actions to and from Email, Google Calendars, Flickr, SMS, phone, LinkedIn, Last.fm, Dropbox, Instagram, Instapaper, Posterous, Pinboard, Soundcloud, Vimeo, YouTube, Diigo and more. To be frank, ifttt isn’t revolutionary: many of the hacks were possible using Twitterfeed, dlvr.it or other services, but ifttt has a complete flexibility to it that is truly interesting and widely useful, and becomes more powerful the more you use and understand it.

Ah, the wonderful power of simple tools to rebuild the Internet.

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* Letter #89, Cool Email Tools.
** I don’t use it for Facebook, but it’s possible to create some of the same functions with ifttt and Facebook.