Skip to main content

If This Then That: Automate The Internet With Conditional Logic

If This Then That is an incredibly clever new tool that lets you automate interactions between dozens of Web services you use in ways you never thought is possible. The service functions on the simple logic of “if this, then that”. The user is allowed to program the “this” part, which is the trigger, and the action – the “that” part. By carefully and ingeniously choosing both you can create tasks that ranges from the mundane to the bizarre and useless.

ifttt

For example, you can create a task that automatically saves all pictures you post to Facebook to your Dropbox account. Or you could create a task that monitors a RSS feed and whenever certain terms are mentioned you could get an SMS. Or you may automatically post to Tumblr when photos with specific tags are uploaded to Flickr. How about getting a voice call on your cell phone when the weather forecast predicts rain the next day? This and an overwhelming number of different things are possible with If This Then That.

The basic workflow is to choose a service from a list of channels, which include popular web services like Gmail, Tumblr, Wordpress, RSS, Delicious, Instagram, Last.fm, Twitter, Craiglist or more general tasks like phone calls, SMS or time-based actions. Once you have the “this,” the next step is choosing a trigger. Triggers vary according to the “this” you’ve selected. After you have your trigger set, you add the “that” portion which consist of the same channels you saw in “this”, but now instead of triggers you choose actionable tasks.

The best part is once you have created a “recipe”, you can share it with others. Users have shared thousands of “recipes” till now that does great many things. For instance, these is one that will send Google reader starred items to Readability, and another one that will archive all of your old tweets in Evernote for later review, and yet another recipe that will automatically populate your Google Calendar with a current schedule of film releases.

About 30 different web services are supported and many more could be coming in the future.

ifttt-channels

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

69 alternatives to the default Facebook profile picture

If you have changed the default Facebook profile picture and uploaded your own, it’s fine. But if not, then why not replace that boring picture of the guy with a wisp of hair sticking out of his head with something different and funny?
332 comments
Read more

How to Record CPU and Memory Usage Over Time in Windows?

Whenever the computer is lagging or some application is taking too long to respond, we usually fire up task manager and look under the Performance tab or under Processes to check on processor utilization or the amount of free memory available. The task manager is ideal for real-time analysis of CPU and memory utilization. It even displays a short history of CPU utilization in the form of a graph. You get a small time-window, about 30 seconds or so, depending on how large the viewing area is.
17 comments
Read more

How to Schedule Changes to Your Facebook Page Cover Photo

Facebook’s current layout, the so called Timeline, features a prominent, large cover photo that some people are using in a lot of different creative ways. Timeline is also available for Facebook Pages that people can use to promote their website or business or event. Although you can change the cover photo as often as you like, it’s meant to be static – something which you design and leave it for at least a few weeks or months like a redesigned website. However, there are times when you may want to change the cover photo frequently and periodically to match event dates or some special promotion that you are running or plan to run. So, here is how you can do that.
1 comment
Read more