October 15, 2011, 8:09 AM — Last week, I told you about a great new service called "If This Then That" (IFTTT), which lets you automate things online. I also gave instructions on how to post on Google+ via email.
Together, these let you automatically post things to Google+. But I didn't tell you how, exactly. I announced a "contest" to see who could come up with the most useful and fun Google+ automations using IFTTT.
If you're as lazy as I am, you'll be thrilled to learn that once created, these automations -- called "recipes" -- can be shared and easily re-used by anybody. And I'll share the winning contest entries with you below.
But first, let's take a look at what this automating Google+ thing is all about.
There are two basic directions for automating Google+: incoming and outgoing. To automate is to set it up so that things are put in or taken out automatically, without you having to do anything.
How to automate Google+ output
Setting up your Google+ feed to auto-post elsewhere -- say, Facebook, Twitter or on a blog -- is easy and popular, and there are many ways to do it.
A nicely curated list of those options is maintained by a Google+ user and advocate named Johnathan Chung.
The most common options happen to be browser plug-ins, and there are many to choose from for all the major browsers.
You can also automate output via RSS. This is a simple process of plugging in the RSS feed URL for your public Google+ posts to just about any service or site that accepts RSS.
For example, I publish an email newsletter using a service called MailChimp. You can set up MailChimp to take any RSS feed and publish new content in that feed as an automated newsletter. So I publish my Google+ posts as both a daily and a weekly newsletter.
Once I set it up, it required no further action on my part. I just post things on Google+, and my thousands of readers get a newsletter via email, complete with pictures and links.
It's easy to get an RSS feed URL for your public Google+ posts. Several services enable you to simply add your unique Google+ number to the end of their service's URL. You can find your number in the URL when you're looking at your profile page.
For example, my unique Google+ number is 113117251731252114390. Here's the RSS feed for my public Google+ posts on three services:
PlusFeed: http://plusfeed2.appspot.com/113117251731252114390
gPlusFeed: http://gplusfeed.herokuapp.com/113117251731252114390
Dlvr.it: http://dlvritplus.appspot.com/113117251731252114390
There are more on Johnathan Chung's list. By simply replacing your Google+ number with mine, you'll have your RSS feed URL as well, which you can plug in to any service that accepts RSS.
Google+ output automation is easy. And now, thanks to a few brave readers and Google+ circle friends, Google+ input automation is easy, too, for the first time ever.
How to automate Google+ input
Automatically adding things from the outside world into your Google+ stream used to be impossible. The reason was that SMS appeared to be the only possible input, and that SMS had to come from your own personal phone number.
But thanks to a neat hack detailed in last week's column, you can actually post to Google+ via email.
And thanks to the IFTTT service, you can use that email input to automatically take things from other places on the Internet and add them to your Google+ stream.
Lots of people took up my challenge last week and created Google+ input automations using IFTTT. Note that by clicking on the links associated with each tip, you can simply use them for your own Google+ account. (But first you need to set up Google+ email posting using the tip in last week's column.)
