I’m all about saving time. I love when I stumble across a utility that saves me time and effort. Right now I run a few social media accounts: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Etc. I always found it annoying then I had to manage my profile picture on all the sites, and didn’t have one tool to do all of them. So I began my search to find a solution. That is when I found the website IFTTT (if this, then that). The useful little app lets you connect channels (Facebook, Twitter, iOS contacts, etc, etc) and then write simple recipes to interact with those channels in a “If this happens, do that” method. So in my example, I setup the Facebook and Twitter channels and set up a recipe to say if my Facebook profile photo changes, set my Twitter profile photo to match. That’s it. Done. Now whenever I setup a new Facebook photo my Twitter photo changes along with it. In fact, here is the recipe to do so:

https://ifttt.com/recipes/109961-make-my-facebook-profile-photo-my-twitter-profile-photo

Since I started using the app they have changed the branding a bit and now have a few apps available:

If – Recipes are triggered my channels. (IE, if something happens on my Facebook, my Twitter, an RSS feed gets updated, etc)

Do Button – Essentially, you trigger an action by pressing the button on your photo. Uses the same channels, but you are triggering the actions (turn on a light, send a standard email, etc)

Do Camera – The app takes a picture/video and then triggers an action with that item (send a receipt to onenote, share a picture on your twitter, etc

Do Note – The app lets you input a piece of text and then triggers an action with that text (set my Facebook status to this, make a reminder with some text, etc)

I am currently using this utility to automate lots of little things. If I post something new on my website, I have rules that will cross post to Facebook and Twitter. If a new piece of RSS news gets posted on MLBTradeRumors.com with Toronto Blue Jays news, I get an email with the details. (You could write a rule to email you whenever I made a new blog post)  There are loads of little utilities you can write quickly and easily with this little utility. If there is a task you do over and over (email spouse you are on the way, backup your new contacts to your google drive, etc) install these apps and give it a try. You will be able to quickly and easily write little recipes to do simple tasks.

The only downside I’ve found…. the tool isn’t quite robust enough. It is limited to simple rules that can’t trigger multiple events. (you cant write a recipe that says do this AND that, that would require two recipes). Also the recipe has made a trade off in that it wants to be very user friendly, but it keeps you from writing detailed HTML and other code in some of the recipes. That has prevented me from being able to do a few powerful recipes. Fortunately, I have other tools I use for that. I will share that another day. But the website and apps are worth a try. iOS and Android both have options, but anyone with a web browser can use at least some of the functions. I have included the ios links within the article.  Enjoy.  Happy Automating – J