November 10, 2014

If you haven’t heard of IFTTT by this point, you’re sitting in the dark somewhere. IFTTT is the hugely popular platform that makes it dead simple to connect one web service to another.

Like what?

Connecting one service to another creates a recipe, here’s an example of a few recipes.

Say you’re following the Twitter hashtag #savethewhales and need to document all tweets related to that campaign. IFTTT can connect Twitter to Evernote so that every time the hashtag is used you can document the tweet on the note taking service.

You can set your Phillips Hue bulb to change colors if you get a new message on Facebook or you’re @mentioned on Twitter.

One that I use is SMS based, with a recipe that sends me a message to wear a coat if the temperature dips below 60 degrees or bring an umbrella if it’s raining.

At present IFTTT has 145 channels, connecting just about everything to everything else. Here’s a sampling of some of those services.

So what’s next for the platform?

I have a few ideas on what they’ll do next and the first of which is an IFTTT button, much like the share buttons we see today. The button will make it easy to connect page content (like site, author, topic) to other IFTTT services, delivery content to you in a way you want to consume. How might this work? Any time Thomas Friedman has a new piece up on the New York Times, post it to my Facebook or send me an SMS.

IFTTT could create multi-threaded recipes making if more like If This Then That and That. For example, post all my Instagram photos to both Twitter and to Facebook (instead of creating a recipe to post to both services).

What else? Metrics for channel owners are really a must with a lack there of probably a deal breaker for some services. As a channel owner I’d really like to see a dashboard with all my channel subscribers, all the times a recipe with my channel has been triggered and how many recipes include my channel. I’d also like to see a rundown of how people are using my content, there are probably uses I haven’t thought about.

As for integration I can see IFTTT working in cars, televisions and more hardware devices, basically anything connected to the web. Your fridge? Possibly.

More on the housekeeping side, IFTTT will need to clean up how their channels are displayed. They’ve done this to a degree with their recipe collections but there’s still a long way to go until we understand how to use every channel.

IFTTT has come a long way since launch in 2011. I can’t wait to see what they do over the next three years.

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