Skip to main content

If This, Then What?

Imagine that you could combine services (internet and otherwise) together like Lego blocks to create new, personalised services.

If This, Then That (ifttt) is a new service that allows you to do just that.

Through an intuitive interface ifttt puts the power of "Event Driven Programming" at your fingertips, letting you connect services with digital duct tape. Event driven programming can be simply broken into two stages - event selection/detection followed by event handling. ifttt terms these stages as triggers and tasks and provides a comprehensive list of services that you can target as a trigger or task, from Facebook and Twitter through to Google calendar events.

For example, it is possible to build a service that will send a text to your mobile phone (task) if the weather service has forecast rain for the following day (trigger). The mechanism for building such a service is so simple and straight-forward that no programming knowledge is required. Trigger and task construction follows a simple workflow of clicks. In some cases, it is necessary to provide some extra details in order to fine tune the trigger/task or to authorise ifttt to access your online account.

This is a really awesome idea that has been well executed and realised. The simplicity of how these new services can be glued together and the countless possible outcomes from the trigger/task combinations opens the power of the web to everyone.
I realize that ifttt only addresses a small subset of the ways in which you can be creative with digital information, but within that subset there are tons of opportunities to hook together existing services, devices and objects. For instance, you can use Google reader starred items to share images on your Tumblr blog, or customize how and which photos from your Flickr stream show up on your Facebook wall.

Linden Tibbets, ifttt


Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Brain Error: No space left on device

I'm not dumb. I just have a command of thoroughly useless information. Calvin - It's a Magical World, Bill Waterson Wired's June 2008 edition included an article entitled ' Quiet Please : how Man-made noises may be altering Earth's ecology'. The article focused on the theory put forward by Bernie Krause , a field recording scientist, that nature's soundtrack (biophony) is being adversely affected by a louder human-made cacophony (anthrophony). Krause postulates that the animal kingdom divides the acoustic spectrum so it's inhabitants do not interfere with each other. However, human-made noise is increasingly disrupting this harmony and intrudes on a piece of the spectrum already in use - drowning out natures voice. As an example, Krause summizes that the rapidly declining population of the Yosemite spadefoot toad is due to the noise generated from low-flying military aircraft, performing training exercises in the area. Coyotes and owls are able to home ...
2 comments
Read more

Local Testing OAuth Social Signin

On some recent Grails projects, I have been looking at using the Twitter and Facebook OAuth signin process. This process allows you to authenticate users based on their Twitter/Facebook logins, without the need for the user to expose their passwords to your site. When you create your 'application' within Twitter or Facebook, it is necessary to define the URL where the application can be accessed. Twitter and Facebook will only redirect to this URL during the authentication process. I have tested running some applications on Heroku or Appfog , with Twitter and Facebook happy to redirect to the appropriate URLs with successful authentication. However, when testing locally, I follow these steps to work through the authentication process. 1. App Context Ensure that the Grails app context is '/' - as the application is generally deployed this way on Heroku/Appfog: Config.groovy grails.app.context = '/' 2. Port Binding: While the local application w...
Post a Comment
Read more

Coding Cults & Internet Gods

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Arthur C. Clarke Its been talked about before , but while reading the ' The God Delusion ' by Richard Dawkins (and no he doesn't Twitter !), the meme of the Cargo Cult once again caught my attention. Cargo Cult: Waiting for Frum Anthropologists have observed the phenomenon of island inhabitants (most famously of Pacific Melanesia and New Guinea) mimicking and performing rituals of visiting advanced cultures in the belief that these acts will provide them with material goods and wealth. This phenomenon is known as a Cargo Cult . The islanders observed that the visiting people enjoyed great luxuries, with seemingly little or no useful work required in return - they sat behind desks while new or repaired items appeared on the island as if by magic. In one instance, on the island of Tanna in the New Hebrides (now known as Vanuata), the islanders awaited the return the messianic Mr John Frum who would bear ...
Post a Comment
Read more