Trunk Spotlight: ifttt to Connect Evernote with Other Services You Use

Partners | 30 Dec 201130 Dec 11 | By Kasey Fleisher Hickey

35 comments

App/developer name: ifttt
Platform: Web
Price: Free
Type: Task management

Imagine if the Internet was like a Rube Goldberg machine; an event in one place caused a planned cascade of actions. Well, now there’s a way to make that a reality. A service called IFTTT (if this, then that), allows you to devise a simple automated flow that starts whenever a certain action occurs. The setup is easy, the possibilities are endless and it can make Evernote even more useful for you.

Create Tasks and Recipes with ifttt

Ifttt connects two services of your choice to create an automated flow called a recipe. Recipes consist of Triggers and resulting Actions. You can create your own recipe or use those created by other ifttt users. There’s a near-infinite number of ways to use ifttt. Here are some great Evernote-related recipes.

Using ifttt with Evernote

To get started, create an ifttt account. Next, decide what your first task will be (a world of possibilities!). In these recipes, a Trigger in Craigslist, Twitter, Gmail, Foursquare, and others will create a new note in your Evernote account.

Here are some of the ways you can use ifttt with Evernote:

Keep track of searches in Craigslist. Have every new posting that matches your search parameters sent to your Evernote account. [recipe]
Create a new note in Evernote for every Starred item in Gmail. Don’t miss important emails; send them straight to your Evernote account for followup or reference. [recipe]
Create a new note in Evernote every time you Star an article in Google Reader. Remember articles and blog posts from your Google Reader and access them from any device where you have Evernote installed. [recipe]
Save your Instagram photos to Evernote. Are you an avid Instagrammer? Use Instagram to create and share your beautiful photos, then ifttt will save a copy of the photo to your Evernote account for easy access. [recipe]
Archive your Tumblr posts in Evernote. Enable Tumblr to send new posts straight into Evernote to create a searchable archive of everything you publish. [recipe]
Send your Flickr photos to Evernote. Send all newly-published, public photos straight to your Evernote account. [recipe]
Create an archive of your Foursquare checkins in Evernote. Keep track of your activities about town to remember places you’ve recently visited and might want to return to. [recipe]
Send your favorited Tweets to a Favorite Tweets notebook. Anytime you favorite a tweet, automatically send it to an Evernote notebook where you’ll be able to keep track of your most valuable tweets. [recipe]

We see infinite possibilities for automating tasks with ifttt to make Evernote even more useful. Have you already created some recipes in ifttt that you’d like to share?

Learn more about featured, Trunk

http://colleenyoung.wordpress.com/ Colleen Young

With ifttt I created a task to automatically send my Diigo bookmarks to Evernote (they go automatically to Delicious as well). I’m so backed up!
Stephen Upham

Is this secure? When you set up a recipe you give ifttt the permission to read information in in your Evernote files.
- jmjstandin
  
  Yes, I’m worried about this too. Any comments from Evernote support?
  - Greg
    
    Hi, another great looking useful app, but I am loath to open up all my notebooks. To be able to use this or other similar App. It would be great if we could limit to write access only or full access to only one Notebook that could be setup for this purpose. I am made this comment before and I would really like to get some feedback from Evernote if this is in their future product plans.
  - http://about.me/quirkybean Hazel
    
    Not sure if this’ll help to know, but I’ve been using for ifttt for months and never experienced any trouble. Their social media team is also lovely.
- jbenson2
  
  I do not trust a system that hands my password information over to a 3rd party. I’ll stick with cut and paste.
  - http://alphaefficiency.com Bojan
    
    IFTT is convenient, but I don’t understand their business model. I can’t understand how they are making money and what are their plans on how will they make money.
    
    If they are going to profit from my informations, they will not have me as a customer. If they plan on charging for a service and keep my data confidential, they just might acquire me as a client.
- Stephen Upham
  
  Until I someone gives me some warm fuzzies bout ifttt, I have come up with a few workarounds to accomplish the same thing – albeit requiring a few more keystrokes.
  
  (1) On twitter page, prt scrn and select section you want to clip. Cons – Resulting photo clip has no active links.
  (2) On twitter page, open tweet and very carefully select text to copy, clip selection. I am using Chrome clipper. Cons – tedious procedure.
  (3) Use TweetDeck, go to upper left corner of Tweet, select lower right item – other actions, Tweet, email Tweet – email to Evernote. This works nicely.
- Heather
  
  The permissions when you set up an ifttt recipe are pretty standard for one of our partner integrations:
  
  It needs to create notes via the feed, and will also search for notes created by that feed (tagged in a special partner data field) so it can update them if needed. It will not be able to delete any notes from your account. From what I understand, there are other integrations with ifttt that might allow you full permission into an account, but we didn’t go that route.
  - Henning
    
    Heather thanks for clarifying this. Still I feel uncomfortable granting iftt these permissions, as much as I would like to use their service.
    
    “Create notes” permission is no issue for me, but “Read notes” is. A far as I understand, iftt could access all my notes, not only the notes they created.
    
    Even though I trust iftt not to abuse this permission, I cannot trust them to be 100% secure against 3rd party attacks. A hacker gaining access to the iftt backend could collect all Evernote data from all connected Evernote accounts. I think this risk is very real: iftt is a young startup, they might not have the resources for high end security measures just yet. With these permissions in place they suddenly have access to very valuable and private information, so they are a worthwhile target for hackers.
    
    I think lftt should drop the “Read notes” permission or at least make it optional. For most cases there is no need to update a note after it was created.
fotofah

This sounds great! (I just joined ifttt, tried out 2 recipes to Evernote.) I’d really like to know about other recipes as well.
http://colleenyoung.wordpress.com/ Colleen Young

fotofah you can look at all the recipes people have created http://ifttt.com/recipes

Stephen I shared your concern – but they’d be gone in a heartbeat if they abused the ability to read your Evernote files.

I’m very impressed so far with ifttt. It just works!
http://www.scripturezealot.com Scripture Zealot

As a photographer, I could put Flickr photos in a notebook for photo ideas (obeying copyrights and only as concepts).

The bookmarks is a great idea.
Jeff
http://www.greatlifeblog.wordpress.com Amanda

Wait, is there a way to assign what notebook the note goes into? If yes the screenshot doesn’t show.
Tom Mora

I echo the same concerns about security of my information. Too many companies in my ‘kitchen’!
Still trying to wrap mind around this app. I would need to see it in action to figure out if this saves time or a possible GTD tool.
- Traci
  
  You can try it with something benign. My first ifttt recipe was to text me if rain was in the forecast for tomorrow. Since I almost never watch the news, this has been wonderful. IFTTT gained my trust with tasks like this first, before I experimented with more sensitive information. Hope this helps…tp
http://pharmastrategyblog.com maverickNY

I created a couple of IFTTT recipes to send email or Gmails based on various tags to send PDFs to specific notebooks as this is mostly hat I use Evernote for and thought it was a great way to automate a laborious task.

However, while you can send images, notes and links this way you can’t send PDFs or files! Frustrating!
Christian

It would be cool if the EverNote create a memo with specific content would function as a trigger. So you could add notes with a specific content automatically in Google Calendar.

That would be pretty cool
Scelza

I just set this up yesterday, and am loving it! What a timely post.

However, I wish we could use Evernote as a trigger, say, when a new note is created with a tag.

I guess you can make a notebook public and get the rss by appending /feed to the folder url, then add it as an rss feed, but it would be nice to have some hooks to do this within ifttt itself.

Good stuff.
- Adam
  
  Yes, please add evernote as a trigger.
  
  I want to use this to organize the notes. Like “if note contains word X, add tag y” or if note contains tag X, push to my blog.

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