Tweeting smarter with ifttt

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A few months ago i stumbled over ifttt whilst browsing twitter. If i remember rightly it was someone giving a practical example of using an IF THEN ELSE statement. As I tell my students as they use Scratch and Kodu; all games from Space Invaders to COD are based on simple and complex IF THEN ELSE statements.

I was looking for different ways to tweet a little smarter and manage my twitter account. I used a few tools to capture some of my favourite tweets and links such as Instapper and Evernote. What attracted me to ifttt was the ability to search not just my timeline but also twitter as a whole on topics which I find of interest.

ifttt allows you to do a number of things through your twitter account

These range from favourites, to tweets by you and also others. There is also a facility to send an auto tweet to new followers. The latter can be a little impersonal in my opinion and also doesn’t add the full @twittername to the tweet although i may be missing something. The tool i have been using is the “new tweet from a search”.

I have been using lists rather sparingly since they were added to twitter but with ifttt i can manage not just tweets from my timeline but also others on a #hashtag or topic which i may miss. I use this facility to add users to a list named after the search topic.

          

These triggers are not just restricted to twitter as ifttt offers a number of options to link with a number of different social media channels

I use one of the recipes available to connect my Evernote account to my Twitter account so that my tweets are archived.

Of course there are thousands available and given more time I would play with some of the others

   Through ifttt i know use lists more to filter great tweets about topics i am currently interested in such as

• openbadges
• ictcurric
• digitalstudies
• solotaxonomy
• rethinkingict

So if i add you to a list, don’t worry I’m not stalking your every tweet, I’m just using ifttt to tweet a little smarter