Connect Your Life With IFTTT

If you've ever done any programming you'll be familiar with the "If-Then-Else" statement - or Case Statements. It's a very intuitive way of programming because it imitates well how decisions are made in real life. If something happens then we do that.

A new free online service named IFTTT has taken that to a whole new level allowing you to make connections between 59 different channels and use recipes to build connections between different online services in an if this then that style in an easy to use interface without you ever needing to write a single line of code!

A channel is basically a service and include are Twitter, Facebook, Evernote, Youtube, Google Calender and loads more. You can then further connect those actions through the services own features or use your first IFTTT action to perform it's action while also acting as another trigger and chain together really complex connections between all your various services. A public database of recipes is hosted directly within the service and offers hundreds of ready-made - useful or time-saving - connections which you can set-up in just seconds.

Super Useful Things You Can Do With IFTTT

IFTTT watches for a specific trigger event and then performs an action which you have defined. If This happens Then do That. There's a bunch of useful things you can do with that formula and allow the service to conditionally decide on an action and perform it on your behalf.

You can use it to get notified if it's going to rain tomorrow, to update your Twitter profile pic every time you update your Facebook profile pic or the other way around if you want. You could get SMS alerts sent to you on a specific date to remind you of something or use the RSS feed from your favorite news site and have today's new stories emailed to you in the evening.

There's so many different ways you could connect together everything that it's hard to imagine a limit to what you could come up with. Below I have a list of 10 useful things you could use IFTTT for.

10 Things You Can Use It For Right Now

1. If I share a picture on Instagram then Tweet that picture.
2. If it's going to rain tomorrow then send me an email.
3. If new movies are added to Netflix then email me.
4. If I mark a YouTube video to 'watch later' then save the URL to Evernote.
5. If I'm tagged in a Facebook photo then save it to Dropbox.
6. If It's 1 week before my Anniversary then send me a text to remind me.
7. If my favorite site has posted new articles this week then send them to me in an email.
8. If I publish a blog post then share it on Twitter.
9. If I star an article in Google Reader then post it to my Pocket.
10. If i-Tunes update their free app of the week then email me the link.

So that's 10 simple recipes that are available to add to your IFTTT account right from the app's recipe database. But that's not the limit of IFTTT's power, you could do much more with it. You could use some of the more advanced triggers and actions, link some of the lesser used channels or chain together long sequences of events that make your life or job much easier linking together apps to make your life more productive connecting together Evernote or Dropbox with other apps and to take notes and save files for you automatically.

On Friday we'll be taking a look at how to use IFTTT to build a close relationship between your actions on Facebook and Twitter and on Sunday we'll take a look at some of the more advanced things you could do with IFTTT but for now just have a browse through the recipes that are already there.

I guarantee you'll find at least one recipe that interests you or that automates something you do just now manually. If you find any cool recipes be sure to let me know in the comments.