IFTTT Blog

A step towards simpler Shared Recipes

Wed, 10 Apr 2013 09:46:00 -0700

We believe that it’s baked into our very nature as people that once we’ve solved a problem we immediately look to spread that solution to others who might also benefit.

Over 18 months ago, we introduced what has become one of the foundations of our product: the Shared Recipe. This morning, someone shared the 88,904th Recipe on IFTTT.

It’s the wild variety of creative stories that people tell with their Recipes that serves as one of our main sources of inspiration. Stories like Stolen Bike Finder and Instagram Screensaver teach an old dog new tricks. Some stories are kind of silly, but then again, potentially practical like Call your mom and Goodbye, beer belly! We love this stuff.

As easy as pushing a button

Recipes should be as easy to use as pushing a button. With that goal in mind, we’re taking steps towards improving the tools you use to craft and share Recipes on IFTTT.

With new options to hide input fields and customize labels with your own language, we aim to inspire Recipes that get as close to one step as possible.

—The IFTTT Team

Let the Games begin

Fri, 27 Jul 2012 09:33:31 -0700

We’re thrilled to announce a special edition ESPN Olympics Coverage Channel that will be available during the London Games!

ESPN is the premier source of news and results for the 2012 Summer Olympics, and we’ve created five exciting Triggers powered by The Worldwide Leader in Sports.

The latest news

ESPN’s extensive news coverage is available through two Triggers: New Olympics top story lets you follow the biggest news stories while New Olympics story from search gives you control over the stories most important to you, such as your favorite athlete or sport.

Complete medal results

When your favorite country wins a medal, be the first to know with the New Olympic medal by country Trigger. Use the New Olympic Gold medal by country and New Olympic Gold medal and world record Triggers for more refined results.

We can’t wait to see all the fun Recipes you share with the community using this special edition Channel. Keep your eyes on the what’s hot list for all the latest and greatest Shared Recipes!

—The IFTTT Team

The New IFTTT

Wed, 20 Jun 2012 08:11:00 -0700

Over the past few months, our team has been working hard to improve your experience with IFTTT. We’re proud to announce a new look, new language, new Channels, and speedier Triggers!

A New Look

Our new logo and wordmark come from the idea that the combination of two basic elements can yield new value and meaning. Our goal with this bold new look is to make creating, discovering, and sharing these combinations as intuitive as possible.

Simplified Language

We’ve unified everything under the term Recipes: Personal Recipes (formerly known as Tasks) and Shared Recipes. In addition, we’ve renamed Add-ins to Ingredients. Now you can add Ingredients to your Recipes! For more info, head over to our revamped About page.

New Channels

Today marks our first foray into the physical world. Now IFTTT works with Belkin’s WeMo devices! WeMo is a family of simple, ingenious products that allow you to control home electronics from anywhere. Turn them on or off, trigger them with motion, even put them on a schedule. You’ll find two new exciting Channels – The WeMo Switch and the WeMo Motion – on our Channels page.

Quick Triggers

We’re excited to announce Quick Triggers on IFTTT! Recipes that use Quick Triggers work as soon as they receive new Trigger data. Quick Triggers can be identified by the lightning bolt icon. The Channels that currently support Quick Triggers are Email, SMS, Phone, Google Talk, and the two new WeMo Channels! We hope to convert more Triggers to Quick Triggers in the near future, so stay tuned.

The launch of this redesign marks the beginning of some outstanding improvements to IFTTT that will roll out in the coming months. Please continue sharing your feedback — it’s your voice that inspires us to keep building!

—The IFTTT Team

One million tasks created

Mon, 30 Apr 2012 10:16:00 -0700

Thank you!

—The ifttt Team

ifttt one year in

Wed, 14 Dec 2011 09:16:00 -0800

Today marks one year since we humbly launched ifttt into private beta and it’s been a wild ride to say the least! We dropped the ‘private’ in ‘private beta,’ introduced Recipes and built new Channels/Triggers/Actions like mad.

Though ifttt is still in its early stages, people continue to surprise us with new and incredibly useful tasks every day. Just yesterday, we saw our four hundred and thirty thousandth task created.

It is a fantastic start and we can’t wait to add new Channels and shape up Recipes to help more people discover useful connections that fit their digital needs and behaviors.

We’re hiring!

There are vast swaths of unexplored territory and lots left to design and build, including mobile apps, premium features and channels, and APIs. To get us there, we’re excited to start growing a team of adventurous and creative people focused on building a revolutionary product. If you’re game, check out our jobs page.

More to come

Our mission is to enable everyone to create valuable connections between the services and devices they use everyday. Even though we are over a year in, it still feels like ifttt is just getting warmed up!

—The ifttt Team

ifttt is alive!

Wed, 07 Sep 2011 08:22:00 -0700

It has been nine months since our simple idea with big ambitions made its first public appearance and we are pleased to announce that ifttt is now open for all!

We began with the theory that as our digital tools became more domain specific and easier to use, there would be vast amounts of creative potential in how any two tools might be used in tandem. We knew that with this immense potential came a problem of equal proportions. There just aren’t enough developers and designers in the world to craft all these connections. A million developers at a million laptops wouldn’t even make a dent. So we set out to build an incredibly simple tool that anyone could use to define creative, event-driven tasks that fit the pattern “if this then that.”

Over these last nine months our beta testers responded ferociously, creating over 100 thousand tasks that have collectively triggered more than 25 million times. We’d like to sincerely thank everyone who gave the tires a good kick, shared suggestions, or helped squash a bug. Please, keep it coming!

Introducing ifttt Recipes

We believe that it’s baked into our very nature as people that once we’ve solved a problem we immediately look to spread that solution to others who might also benefit.

Many people have sent us enthusiastic feedback and have written instructive blog posts about how they’ve used ifttt in new or interesting ways. We were inspired by how excited people are about expressing these solutions, and in response we’ve designed a system called Recipes.

Turn any task into a Recipe and share the link with your friends. They’ll be only a few clicks away from turning your Recipe into a task.

The next steps

With a Post-it bill rivaling our server bill and amazing suggestions pouring in, we’ve no shortage of ideas on where to take ifttt next. If you can verbally describe a task you’d like to create, we believe it’s only a matter of time before ifttt can make that connection a reality.

One last thing (I couldn’t resist)

A crucial element in building any tool that enables creativity is defining the right set of constraints. You have to start with a box before you can think outside of it. Though sometimes, it’s the absence of limitations in just the right places that drive creative thought. With that in mind, we are thrilled to announce that we’ve done away with the limit on how many tasks you can enable. May your imagination run wild…

Linden, Jesse, & Alexander

ifttt the beginning...

Tue, 14 Dec 2010 13:37:00 -0800

I’d like to humbly announce that the first beta invites for a project I’m incredibly excited about are out the door. The project is called ifttt, shorthand for “if this then that”. With this blog I hope to begin fleshing out some of the initial inspirations that led to the inception of ifttt and provide you with a taste of how ifttt can help put the internet to work for you.

A few years ago I became passionate about visualizing data and began experimenting with small projects that filtered and presented information in interesting ways. While these projects were met with moderate success, they provided me ample opportunity to think about how technology was shaping our behavior and what being creative in an increasingly digital world could mean.

One evening, waiting in line to order Indian food, I was lost in thought about an event-driven programming problem when something clicked in a funny way. As nerdy as “event-driven programming” may sound, the concept is really quite simple. During the execution of a program, the programmer has some idea about what types of events may happen. For example “a user clicks a specific button” or “a new message is received by your inbox”. Knowing what these events are, you can then attach a bit of code that runs the same way every time an event is encountered. Its very much like cause and effect, except as a programmer you’re free to be creative with what effects match up to each cause.

Before I get back to addressing that funny click, there was another concept that I was enthralled with at the time. Namely, our innate ability to shape an environment in small ways to better suit our needs. Now, I’m not speaking of the grand scale shaping that an inventor engages in, but instead of the shaping that anybody is capable of, often without even realizing it. The kind of simple shaping explored in Jane Fulton Suri’s Thoughtless Acts?

These types of creative adaptations are much easier in a physical world where the useful properties of an individual object can be understood quickly. In the more abstract digital world, these adaptations are a bit harder to come by, with even the simplest of insights requiring years of engineering experience to successfully implement. However, over the past 20 years the layman’s technical vernacular has expanded blindingly fast. At the same time, we’ve been breaking down the core unit of definable functionality into ever smaller and more digestible pieces, from monolithic operating systems, to web based applications and mobile apps.

Now for that click. I realized that the key to unlocking the creative potential of our existing digital tools might be to build a service that simplifies and consolidates the way those tools can be connected.

Even with the recent increase in technical understanding and the divergence of functional applications, the useful properties of software will forever remain abstract when compared to a physical object. This is where ifttt can help. By providing a simple logical structure, if this then that, along with two fundamental properties that fit into that structure, called triggers and actions, ifttt enables anyone to be creative in their digital environments. Essentially it’s event-driven programming for the masses.

However, ifttt isn’t a programming language or app building tool, but rather a much simpler solution. Digital duct tape if you will, allowing you to connect any two services together. You can leave the hard work of creating the individual tools to the engineers and designers. Much like in the physical world when a 12 year old wants a lightsaber, cuts the handle off an old broom and shoves a bike grip on the other end, you can take two things in the digital world and combine them in ways the original creators never imagined.

I realize that ifttt only addresses a small subset of the ways in which you can be creative with digital information, but within that subset there are tons of opportunities to hook together existing services, devices and objects. For instance, you can use Google reader starred items to share images on your Tumblr blog, or customize how and which photos from your Flickr stream show up on your Facebook wall.

I hope that an adventurous few can find cool ways to use ifttt right now and still others will let me know about how they would like to use it in the future. I know ifttt has a long way to go until it’s as easy as possible to use and I’m sure there will be some bugs and bumps along the way. However, I truly believe that there is something exciting and useful about this idea and we promise to iterate and improve ifttt until near-perfection.

Also, I’m excited to announce that a good friend, Jesse Tane, has decided to join me and is helping design and build some of the first ifttt powered applications. We hope these applications will help shed some light on all the cool stuff that will be possible with ifttt as it evolves.

Thanks for reading and we can’t wait to hear what you think.
Linden Tibbets

Jesse & Linden

Sign up for the beta: http://ifttt.com
More about how ifttt works: http://ifttt.com/wtf
Follow ifttt: http://twitter.com/ifttt

Coming soon

Thu, 11 Nov 2010 16:46:41 -0800

ifttt is coming soon!