Tag Archives: tools for a productive life

IFTTT: Making the internet work for you

IFTTT
Screenshot from here

IFTTT is an internet service whose name stands for ‘if this then that’.  The idea is that IFTTT lets you hook up two different internet services in an action-reaction manner: it watches service A waiting for some signal, and if it sees the signal then it is triggered to automatically take some action with service B. As an example, you could set it up so that being tagged in a Facebook photo will trigger that photo to be downloaded automatically to your Dropbox, or you could make it so that approaching your usual grocery store will trigger a text message reminding you to buy healthy food, or so on. The list of ‘channels’, meaning services which can be used as triggers or actions, is formidable: 183 in all ranging from communication and social media to Android and iOS to cloud backup, shopping, entertainment, business, and more. I’ve been hearing about IFTTT for a while, but I guess I always assumed that it would need a lot of work to do anything cool with it.  I’m happy to report that I was wrong about that, IFTTT is actually very easy to use!
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