IFTTT means “If This, Then That” and it’s a website that allows you to create recipes that do things automatically. A few examples:
- Save any new photo I upload to Flickr to Dropbox
- Send me a SMS tomorrow at 10 reminding me to buy milk
- Automatically send any new post on my blog to Twitter.
IFTTT is implemented around the concept of channels. Flickr and Dropbox are channels. Date/time is a channel, a RSS feed is a channel. Each channel fires triggers when something happens, and allows actions to be performed. By using triggers and actions you can do very interesting things – or simply things that save your time.
It actually resembles some kind of simple service orchestrator. The only difference is that IFTTT spans across dozens of diverse services and websites, and it’s free.
The idea is much more powerful than you’d expect, and the reason is simple. We can’t expect every website or service on the web to integrate with each other – we can only hope the most basic of integrations. The idea of having one central place that orchestrates API calls between services is awesome instead.
Currently there are 51 channels available and you can already do a lot of very cool things. Google+ is not supported at this moment, but I guess it will at some point (please IFTTT, I need it!).
What I’d really like to see is some kind of integration with devices – namely smartphones – very much like Microsoft on{x}. on{x} is very cool, but it doesn’t work that well and drains a lot of battery, plus it’s entirely phone-based. On the other hand, IFTTT is entirely web-based. There’s obviously a gap here.
Of course smartphones can already do most of what IFTTT does, but there will always be battery and connectivity issues to consider, so in my opinion it would make sense for IFTTT to start working on smartphone-based channels.
On a side note, I hope the guys at IFTTT are dead-serious about security because the more services you link to it, the more risk there is for your privacy. Having one service ruling most of your online presence – or even your home appliances – is somewhat scary. But I guess we’re all getting used to such thought.