IFTTT

IFTTT - What in the world!? I just discovered this this morning while once again searching for alternatives to Google Reader, since it's dying in about 2 weeks. I tried Feed Demon at home, but it just didn't cut it; half of the problems being that it was yet another application (and a memory hog at that) that ran in the background on my computer. The other half of the problem is I kept forgetting it was there and couldn't access it remotely.

So I decided, perhaps I'd better port all my podcast subscriptions to iTunes. That's fine. I can deal with that. But what about the rest of my feeds? What about the hundreds of ICHCB titles that come through in a single day? What about InterfaceLift which I've subscribed to for YEARS!? How am I supposed to stay apprised of those?

In the past few days, I've been attempting to get back into Evernote, a service that I've had installed on my phone for about a year and have liked so far, but have not seen the potential of. Well, I thought, why can't I subscribe to an RSS feed via Evernote? Researching, I found nothing conclusive right off the bat. Just a lot of other people asking the same thing. Then one link that said, hey why not just set up an IFTTT link? IFTTT is great.

I asked, what in the world is IFTTT? These people seem to swear by it...so maybe I should look at it. And much to my surprise, it turns out it's just as cool as they say - programmatic links between accounts based on events in either account to cause a reaction in another account!! Want to create a new note in Evernote when an RSS post comes through? No problem. Set up IFTTT to monitor an RSS feed and post a note to Evernote with preset title, content and tag list patterns! Wish Instagram photos showed up in Twitter like they used to? Again, no problem. Have IFTTT post your instagram photos automatically as a Twitter picture attachment. You could even set it up to post the link to the original Instagram post in your Tweet!

Almost every social network I can think of is on there. The only concern I see is for every network you link IFTTT to, you basically click the "Allow IFTTT to do stuff on my account" oAuth button that everybody has. So basically, IFTTT has the capability of centralizing your entire online social life. And if someone got the password to THAT...well.......

For now, I'm attempting to remember all of my old Google Reader RSS feeds that I cleared out over six months ago. I'm sure I still have the list at home, but it should be interesting to see them all pop up in Evernote or whatever else I decide to publish them to!