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ifttt.com has rapidly become one of my favorite websites ever in the whole wide world. “Put the internet to work for you by creating tasks that fit this simple structure: if this then that”, their website claims, and it’s true, using this simple structure ifttt (pronounced ’lift’ without the ‘l’) allows you to create a myriad of awesome programs with no programming experience needed. None at all. You connect your “channels” a.k.a. the services you use like email, Twitter, Evernote, Facebook, Google Reader and many many more. You use these channels to create a task, for example; when I star an entry in Google Reader send it automatically to my Evernote account.

 

Or, when Amazon adds a new book to the top 100 free ebooks for Kindle, send it to my Evernote or to my email address.

 

The ideas and uses are  limited only by your imagination. Your tasks also become “recipes” available for all users to grab and use with their personal channels. It’s neato and if you’re not using it you should be.

I’ve wanted to connect Google+ to ifttt.com for a while but there are few or no easy options for pulling Google+ content into an ifttt recipe.

Luckily, that is about to change. Yesterday on Google+, Joltrast asked Ivano Forgione how he creates a Google Plus RSS feed from his posts, he pointed her towards gplus-to-rss, an automatic feed creater for Google Plus. Just add your Google+ user idea to the end of the url and voila! A custom RSS feed. Sweet! If you don’t know what your Google+ ID is no worries, I can help with that;

So this is what the full link to a RSS feed of my G+ profile looks like http://gplus-to-rss.appspot.com/rss/105326598420089780890, not very handsome, but it gets the job done, and I’m handsome enough for both of us (see above). Also, I wear cool shades.

Now crack open ifttt.com hit the ‘create a task’ button, and let’s get the awesome started. Click ‘THIS’

and choose the ‘Feed‘ option.

 

Now you can choose a trigger, if you choose “New Feed Item” every time you post something to Google+ it will trigger your task, choosing “New Feed Item Matches” allows you to choose a keyword or phrase to trigger the task. For example, my task won’t trigger unless I include #sw in the post.

Insert your feed URL into the correct form box and Create Trigger, and you are ready to go. Now you can do whatever you want with your Google+ data. I use this to cross-post to Twitter, and it can easily be extended to other social networks, Facebook, LinkedIn, tumblr, and many more. You can also use it to save an archive of your posts using Dropbox, Evernote, Email, etc… You can use it for whatever you want.

One note, ifttt checks every 15 minutes for task triggers so don’t be surprised if it’s not instantaneous.

So go do it, I’m curious to hear what you do with your Google Plus RSS feed and ifttt. Comment below, or hit me up.

Steven out.