If you’re like me when you post to Twitter or Facebook or Google+ you often want your post to cascade from one service to the next. Of course none of the services have a vested interested in helping you do this easily so now you’ve got to work your way there. I discovered this service call If This Then That – ifttt.com – a pretty straight forward rules concept and one that already has a bunch of pre-defined rule sets which they call recipes.
So you can imagine a scenario that goes like this:
“If I post a public post to Google+ Then post the contents of that post to a Facebook status update”
or
“If I post a Facebook status update Then create a new tweet”
I created both these rules so I could start with Google+ and cascade a post down through twitter.
So how to get this done? Read on…
Creating a trigger for Google+
I haven’t found it easy to create a trigger for Google+, but ifttt will react to RSS feeds so I started by creating an RSS feed of my public Google+ posts using Feed+ in Chrome.
- Go to the Chrome store and search for ‘Feed+’, install it.
- Find your unique Google+ ID. If you go to your profile in Google+ and look in the URL you will see a really long number after “plus.google.com/”. This number is your unique ID.
- Put this number into Feed+ as shown below.
You can preview your feed and then create it. Remember your feed is public so if someone knows your ID then they can get your feed, but then again you are posting stuff publicly so it’s probably not such a big deal.
Now you can go to ifttt.com and create an account or login if you have an account already.
- Click “Create” in the top menu and you’ll get a fairly obvious UI with the word “This” highlighted.
- Click “This” and you get a smorgasbord of channels (shown below)
- Click the “Feed” icon and then “New Feed Item”. Note you can choose to post based on a keyword match if you want to get fancy.
- Now enter the Feed URL which you can get by going back to Feed+ (above pic) and clicking the “RSS” link. Just copy the URL and post it in here.
- Then you get the “That” highlighted as you continue. Well just click on “that” and click the appropriate channel (either facebook or twitter in this case)
- Click create to finalize your rule.
That’s it. Now you have a rule to get Google+ to Facebook or Twitter. You can create a second rule to go Facebook to Twitter. They don’t have a Twitter to something capability that I saw, so if you figure that out let me know.
I’m still testing this out so I’ll post an update and let you all know how it went.
