Twitter Policy's Latest Victim: If This Then That [UPDATED]

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IFTTT, which stands for If This Then That (pronounced "ift" as in "gift"), allows users to create "recipes" for shuttling their data between services. For example, you could create a recipe that automatically sends your Instagram pics to Dropbox ("If I upload a photo to Instagram, then save it to this Dropbox folder").

In the email, IFTTT CEO Linden Tibbets says as of Sept. 27, users will no longer be able to use tweets as a trigger (the "if" part of the recipe). They will still be able to tweet as an action, however (the "then" part of the recipe). He cites a specific rule in Twitter's new API policy, which disallows uploading Twitter content to any cloud-based service.

"At IFTTT, first and foremost, we want to empower anyone to create connections between literally anything," Tibbets wrote. "We've still got a long way to go, and to get there we need to make sure that the types of connections that IFTTT enables are aligned with how the original creators want their tools and services to be used."

Moreover, Tibbets says IFTTT will delete all personal and public recipes that include Twitter triggers. Although he says the service will work on new tools that are compliant with the Twitters policy changes, he doesn't specify what those will be.

Do you use IFTTT? How will this change affect how you use it? Let us know in the comments.

Update: As commenters have pointed out, the part of Twitter's developer policy that IFTTT cites is actually unaffected by the recent changes to it, according to this Twitter page that notes all the changes. That means IFTTT is removing Twitter triggers because of Twitter's long-standing policy, not the recent changes. We've updated the story to reflect this information.

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