This is the first review I’ve done on here for quite a while - here’s my take on IFTTT. IFTTT is an online automation service that brings together many online applications. Before I begin there is some IFTTT jargon that you should know:
- Channel: An application that you have ‘linked’.
- Trigger: An event that a Channel has. e.g. 'New Mail Received’.
- Action: A task that a Channel can complete automatically.
- Recipe: A combination of a Trigger and an Action.
To give you a feel two of my current recipes are: Post a link to all my new blog posts on Twitter and Add an event to my 'Places' calendar whenever I check in on Foursquare. All the recipes I use are also used by others, there’s a sharing feature, however I’ve made modifications to suit. Custom recipes are also really easy to set up.
I mentioned not so long ago about logging my music - this system has some flaws. It only accounts for the dates the files were created and doesn’t keep a log of every single track you play during a day. However, with the help of the last.fm and Google Drive APIs, I have now solved this problem with IFTTT. A simple Recipe is now triggered every time I play a song, it’s action being to log the song, artist and time in a spreadsheet.
There are a few minor issues with the service, but none come close to being major.
- It’s only as good as the APIs it uses. By this I mean: If an API is weak, lacking in features or none existent (Google+) there is nothing you can really do. There are a few work arounds with 'Send and Email to Add’ features but they are often far from perfect and fail to accomplish anything close to the functionality of a powerful API.
- Multi Action Recipes. Perhaps best explained with an example: I have three recipes where Blogger is the trigger, all with different actions. Surely it would be more efficient to group these? Say, when this happens, do these three things - that just seems more natural to me.
- The site’s interface is nice, however it should have a 'condensed view’ for viewing your recipes. It’s as if they only ever expected people to have a handful of recipes. It would be nice to have a more tabular view available for those users with more recipes.
If you’ve read though this and still don’t really understand what it’s all about head here or just head over to IFTTT to…