I have been playing around with http://ifttt.com for a while now, but I hadn’t used all that many of their channels (their inputs and outputs for creating amazing workflows). Today, I found one that I REALLY like.

Imagine this:

You are managing a Twitter account with a bunch of different people, whether they are all a part of an event team or the same organization. You have run into three distinct problems in managing this twitter account:

1. People tweet overtop of one another, meaning that there are periods of time in which there are a lot of tweets bunched up on one another.
2. People tweet when it is convenient for them rather than when the tweets will actually be seen and consumed by real people.
3. There are long stretches when there are no tweets. No one is really sure who should be handling the twitter account right now, but no one has tweeted for a few days and it becomes clear that no one is taking ownership for the account.

While there are a bunch of highly useful but overly complex tools to manage these three problems, I think that IFTTT does a much better job of making this task easy and putting it into a workflow that is already in existance.

Do this:

1. Create a new Google Calendar called something like “Our Twitter Calendar”
2. Share that calendar with everyone who is managing the twitter account.
3. Have one person use this IFTTT recipe to connect their Google Calendar to the twitter account.

Note: you should change the hashtag that you would like to use to trigger the tweets to something that you would like to use rather than the #LiC that I have in there now.

Once you have set this up, anyone who adds an event to the calendar with the hashtag you have chosen will automatically trigger a Tweet within 15 minutes of the calendar event. That means that you can set up a schedule of tweets months into the future. You can put events on the calendar and have them tweeted out. You can make sure there are no long gaps between tweets. You can make sure that no one is “tweeting on top of one another”. You can also make sure that everyone can tweet without leaving what they are already doing and logging in to twiter or pulling up their applications. You could even schedule tweets from your phone or anywhere else you have access to your calendar.

While this may not seem like a giant leap forward for mankind, I believe that it solves a bunch of problems that organizations have with maintaining their Twitter accounts and updating them with important information in a timely manner.

Here are the sites that I am using:

• http://usabilityhub.com/ – Really great for doing quick tests and laying out exactly what you want people to be looking for. The 5 Second test is my personal favorite. It really shows what people actually look at in the amount of time that most people spend on a page to decide if they want to be there or not. The best part of the site, however, is that you can participate in other people’s tests and sharpen your own powers of observation (and the more tests you do, the more you can ask of others because you are amassing Karma)
• http://usabilla.com/ – I think this one could be really useful because of the way that the tests are structured. There is a good mix of design and usability (click) testing. You have the ability to customize the tests as well, but the one drawback is that there doesn’t seem to be a large community of people that are actively taking these tests so you have to promote them yourself.
• http://openhallway.com/ – I haven’t tested this out a whole bunch just yet, but I really like the idea that I could send out a link to my site and then record how they interact with it, seeing exactly what they are doing. Really great concept, but you still have to get testers yourself.

You may not think you have the time for this level of testing, but after getting the first few sets of feedback from objective perspectives (not your twitter followers) will change your mind.

I’m not sure where this idea came from, but I wanted to get it out before I moved on to the next thing:

Wat if we encouraged everyone we knew to host “Learning Open Houses”, in which they would demonstrate exactly what they were learning and how they were learning it? What if we let others talk about their own learning as a way of letting others into their world? What if we hosted events online where we just sat and listened to one another show off their learning artifacts?

What if we asked one another every day, “What are you learning right now, and would you show it to me?”

I want that. I want to see the environments that others are creating around themselves that best spur their learning. I want to see students hold Learning Open Houses and I want to see employees do the same. I want to see demonstrated learning all over the place, and not just in short tweets or in random serendipity. I want to see extended conversations, where I get a formal invitation to come and look at someone else’s learning.

I want Learning Open Houses to be like art exibits, but where you get to touch and manipulate the art.

I want Learning Open Houses to be like Back to School Nights, but where everyone is showing off their “school of one”.

This idea is hitting me over the head again and again the more that I think about it.

What would you do in a Learning Open House? How would you plan it? Where would you host it? Who would you invite to show your learning to?

Many of these protocols are not copyrighted, and so we would be able to use them off the shelf as we start to build out what insight curation looks like within a team. Anyway, I thought I would share a couple of things on the topic:

1. Start a Google Document with the text of an email I send
2. Start a Google Document by attaching a Powerpoint, Excel, or Word Doc.
3. Have anyone upload to my Google Documents in a predesignated folder

Well, now all of these things are easily within my grasp and I am basking in the glow of this productivity hack. While you may not be as excited about it as I am, here is how you might want to use it:

• To turn in files (from anyone in a meeting or in your classroom) to you in a well organized folder with a time stamp
• To share files with a group of people in a Google Docs collection simply by emailing them to a single email address (and not having to remember all of the emails of the people that should have it)
• To start a collaborative document on your phone by sending an email (that you can continue to edit when you get back to your computer)
• To upload files that you need to have access to in the cloud.
• To CC google docs on conversations that you would like to continue in a more collaborative way than just emailing back and forth.

I’m sure that you can think of a few other ways of using it, but let’s get to the steps for making this happen.

Step 1: Log in to http://sendtodropbox.com by giving the application access to your Dropbox account.

What this will do is give you a single email address that you (and anyone else who you want to have access) will use to upload document (first to Dropbox and then to Google Docs).

Some tips: To keep the next steps as simple as possible, keep the file structure as just Attachments / Filename.

Step 2: Check “Include HTML copy of email message” in Send to Dropbox

This will take whatever is in the body of your email message and create a file in your Dropbox account in the Attachments folder. Make sure you click “Save Settings” after you check the box.

It looks like this:

Step 3: Send a test email to the email address that Send to Dropbox gave you

You can choose to attach a file or not. It will create the Attachments folder in your Dropbox account and it will allow you to use it in the next step.

Step 4: Log into http://wappwolf.com/dropboxautomator by giving the application access to your dropbox account.

This is what will take the files from your dropbox folder and upload them to a Google Docs collection. The question most of you are asking is why not just leave them in Dropbox and be done with it. The answer is that you can’t share the Attachments folder that the Send To Dropbox application makes for you. This limits your ability to leverage the files in that folder (for collaboration and editing purposes).

Step 5: Click “Create a new automation” in Dropbox Automator

The Automator is going to watch a folder for new files. The folder you want to select is the “Attachments” folder that was created by Send to Dropbox.

It looks like this:

Step 6: Choose “Upload to Google Docs” as the action in the Automation you are creating

If this is your first time setting it up, it will ask you to connect your Google Docs to Dropbox Automator as well. After you do that, it will ask you which folder/collection to put the files in. Choose a folder that you would like to be the “inbox” for these types of files and documents.

Make sure you click “Add Action” when you are done with selecting the collection in Google Docs.

Tips: You can also have the Automator do lots of different things to those files in addition to uploading them to Google Docs, including sending them to a Kindle, emailing them to someone else, saving them to another dropbox folder and a bunch of others. Play around with these because your workflow may be more interesting than the one I have envisioned for my tiny purpose.

It looks like this:

Step 7: After you are done adding actions, click “Finished” at the top of the page

It looks like this:

That’s it!

Now if you (or anyone else) emails that Send to Dropbox Address, the attached files and the email itself will be sent first to Dropbox and then in about 10 minutes get picked up and uploaded to the collection of your choosing in Google Docs. Any files that are “Google Docs Types” will be converted for instant editing and they will be made available to anyone you have shared that folder with. Enjoy.

Extra Credit:

If you want to know who sent the files, you can choose to have Send to Dropbox put in a “From Address” in the path in Dropbox. While this makes it easier to know who “turned something in”, you will have to make an automation for each one of the folders in Dropbox Automator in order to have those files moved over into Google Docs. If you are getting things from the same set of people (a classroom or a team, for example, it may be worth the effort).

Also, let me know if you figure out anything cool to do with this hack. I am super excited about how easy it is to automate this process, but I think there is a lot more that we can do with it.

So, while there are many other ways to get Google Calendar to sync with iCal, it always makes your secondary Google Calendars into delagates. The only way to make those secondary calendars into primary ones in iCal is to use this older program (created by Google). It is awesome, however, and I highly recommend it, especially if you want to add items to an iCal calendar from another program on your machine, which would then sync with Google.

I know it sounds like no one would ever want to do this. But I am finding it incredibly important and I thought I would share.

Hall.com: “Our Story

Frustrated by communication tools that were siloed and did not solve real problems. The team quit corporate america to solve the problem.

The company is headquartered in Mountain View, CA.”

Big Marker: “BigMarker is a free web conferencing community. Through our platform, you can reconnect with your family in Rio; manage your employees in Madagascar; organize your non-profit’s resources to Ottawa; teach a virtual class from Tulsa to students all over Thailand; foster a support group for cancer survivors from France to the Falkland Islands. With unlimited access to live events, there are endless opportunities for you, your community, organization, business, classroom, and social network to grow.”