With the arrival of its first mobile app, IFTTT is ready for small business

Keeping up with the growing list of social networks, essential apps, and incoming data streams that have become part of modern online life is difficult for even a Web dabbler. Getting them talking to one another is even tougher, which is where tools like “If This Then That,” or simply “IFTTT,” have become invaluable.
This hacker’s dream of a Web service was developed to help ease the translation of data from one network to another, and now IFTTT has released its first mobile app, for the iPhone platform. The mobile app enhances the utility of IFTTT for all of its users, but its release is also a good time to take a hard look at whether IFTTT can now be put to use in the business world.

IFTTT is so valuable because certain networks, like Facebook, are famously closed off, so doing something that should be simple—like saving your photos to your hard drive or republishing videos on YouTube—can be extremely tedious and time-consuming.

Some of the site’s most popular recipes are mostly personal in structure. (If my Facebook profile picture changes, change my Twitter profile picture to match. If I take a photo on my iPhone, send me a copy of it via email.)

IFTTT remedies this by revolving around a simple design conceit. Using an abbreviated scripting language, users develop “recipes,” each of which takes a single data input and does one single action to or with it. For example: If I like a photo on Instagram, then save that photo to my Dropbox folder. That’s it. It sounds simple, and it is, but it saves you the hassle of doing it for yourself. You don’t even have to write these recipes from scratch. Tens of thousands are available for download from the site’s database. (You can get the Instagram to Dropbox recipe here.)
But an increasing number of recipes have a serious business bent. Want to
back up your mobile device contacts to a Google Docs spreadsheet? Auto-send starred Gmail to Evernote? Link a Blogger account to a Facebook Business Page? There’s, to borrow a phrase, a recipe for that.

And of course, you can always script your own recipes to do more. Savvy businesses might use IFTTT to send a text message to the customer support team if the company receives a mention on Twitter. Or IFTTT can be used to simplify the hassles of keeping various networks up to date. Tumblr, Instagram, Flickr, and more can all be synced up—one at a time, of course.

The iOS version of the IFTTT app doesn’t really do anything the Web version of the system doesn’t do already, but it does make recipe creation and management a more flexible, do-it-anywhere activity. One of the curious things about digging into IFTTT is that you never know where the idea for a killer recipe will strike. But as more and more of both our social and business lives becomes mobile, that serendipity is less and less likely to occur when you’re sitting at your desk. 

Online Productivity Tool IFTTT Goes Mobile, Gets iPhone-Specific Channels

IFTTT, which stands for “If This Then That,” is a terrific tool for automating personal notifications and social media actions online. The service lets you set up recipes like “If I post a photo to Instagram, add the file to my Dropbox,” or “If there’s a birthday reminder, send me a text message,” or “Text me the weather for my ZIP code at 7:00 a.m. every weekday.” There are 67 different services you can tap into (IFTTT calls them “channels”), mixing them to build and curate actions that link normally disparate web services.

It’s an incredible productivity tool — and now it’s an iPhone app, too.

The new IFTTT app, released today, takes what it does so well on the web and gives it a touch-friendly spin. You can create your own recipes, or select from existing ones. And as an app, it can also tap into your iPhone’s Contacts, Reminders, and Calendar in recipes. It can differentiate between whether you’re using the front or rear-facing camera or taking a screenshot, which can be useful if you want to lump specific types of images into folders on Flickr or DropBox, for example. As someone who meets a lot of new people week to week, the ability to automatically send newly added contacts an automated greeting over email seems particularly useful. You can personalize push notification settings recipe by recipe.

Another app-specific feature is a unique feed view of your IFTTT alerts, allowing you to browse both time-based actions and immediate events in one place like a timeline. The app also has a discovery feature that suggests new recipes you may like.

You can grab the free iPhone app here. An Android app is currently in the works, the company says.