IFTTT Will Be Removing Twitter Triggers, But Here Is A Workaround

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If you use IFTTT to capture your Tweets and send them to another service, you probably received a notice from them yesterday about how they will be removing Twitter triggers on September 27:

In recent weeks, Twitter announced policy changes* that will affect how applications and users like yourself can interact with Twitter’s data. As a result of these changes, on September 27th we will be removing all Twitter Triggers, disabling your ability to push tweets to places like email, Evernote and Facebook. All Personal and Shared Recipes using a Twitter Trigger will also be removed. Recipes using Twitter Actions and your ability to post new tweets via IFTTT will continue to work just fine.

I use IFTTT to send all of my tweets to Evernote so I have a record of them. Since this is based on a Twitter trigger, it will no longer work after September 27. Last night, I experimented with an alternative that appears to be working fine this morning: using an RSS feed and sending that to Evernote. Here is how I set it up in IFTTT:

Step 1: Choose Trigger Channel

I selected the Feed channel.

Step 2: Choose a Trigger

I selected New Feed Item

Step 3: Complete Trigger Fields

In the Feed URL field, I entered the URL for the twitter feed for my twitter account. In my case that feed is:  http://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/user_timeline.rss?screen_name=jamietr. Note that you will want to alter this URL and replace my twitter handle with your own.

Step 4: Choose Action Channel

I selected Evernote for my Action Channel.

Step 5: Choose an Action

I selected the Create A Note action.

Step 6: Complete Action Fields

Here is how I completed the action fields for Evernote:

  • Title: EntryTitle
  • Body: EntryContentvia FeedTitle EntryURL
  • Notebook: <enter the notebook you want these notes go to to>
  • Tags: <enter the tags you want to use for these notes>

The Results

Here is what a note in Evernote looked like using the Twitter trigger method (the one that is going away):

photo.PNG

And here is what the note looks like with the new trigger, via RSS instead of Twitter:

photo.PNG

I imagine with some tweaking of the Action fields, you could get them to look almost identical.

There is more of a delay between the time you make the tweet and the time it shows up as a note, but despite that delay, so far every tweet I’ve made since adding this new method appears to be coming through to Evernote.

I’m turning off the new method until September 27, when I will enable it permanently, but I wanted to share this solutions with others who were worried that they might not be able to use Twitter as a trigger in IFTTT going forward.

19 thoughts on “IFTTT Will Be Removing Twitter Triggers, But Here Is A Workaround”

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    1. Jamie Todd Rubin Post author

      Caroline, it is still working for me. I checked IFTTT and the last time the trigger fired for the Twitter RSS feed was 45 minutes ago (for my feed). I then went into Evernote and I have a note for a Tweet I made a little more than 45 minutes ago. So, for me, at least, it is still working.

      Reply ↓
      1. Caroline

        Thanks for the reply, Jamie! I’m trying it again — just made a fresh recipe based on your steps. Fingers crossed that it will work. The other recipes I’d tried in the past stopped working.

        Reply ↓
  9. HanseNico

    Hi,
    I tried this with the “new feed item matches” option because I only want to get those of my tweets, that have a link in it. My keyword therefore is “http://” but it doesn’t seem to work. I also tried it without // or :. Any suggestions how to get only tweets with links?

    Reply ↓
    1. HanseNico

      ok, now it triggered a retweet with a link once. but i still can’t figure out why it done this and ignores others…

      Reply ↓

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  13. steve

    Twitter (RSS) to email/evernote etc. using IFTTT no longer works, it generates “General Trigger Error”s after initially working. This Tweet from @IFTTT: “IFTTT ‏@IFTTT 7 Feb
    @*** those RSS are being discontinued. They are not reliable in your Recipes, so we recommend avoiding them.”

    Reply ↓

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