I don't see many people mentioning this, but it's something I came across a while ago and it is brilliant.'It' being the website ifttt
Okay, so brilliant is a nerdy kind of brilliance but nevertheless for helping to make connections between bits of yourself on the web, it's fabulous. The basic premise is built on the idea of recipes. You combine tasks to create recipes. And the tasks are attached to various services - called channels - from Twitter to Facebook, SMS to email.
You then use the formula 'if this then that' (if this then that = ifttt - geddit?) to combine those tasks to get it to do brilliant stuff.
For example, whenever I post something to this blog, I want it to appear on Twitter. I just set up a recipe that says 'when there's a new entry on the RSS feed... put out a Tweet that looks like that' and away it goes. I want to know when it's going to rain... I create a recipe that says 'when this website says it's going to rain tomorrow in my region... send me a text message to remind me to take a brolly'. Favourite a Tweet and the link automatically gets saved to your Diigo account etc... save something on Diigo with a particular tag and a Tweet broadcasts it or it appears on your Facebook page. Want to backup your Instagram photos to Dropbox then ifttt can do that automatically. Got the idea?
Blogging is a bit like an ifttt recipe - if I see something I want to share then I'm going to blog about it - only ifttt automates the bit in the middle! It's the combining of services and tasks which makes this just a genius little site. Oh, and you don't even have to do the combining yourself... people also publish 'recipes' which you can reuse / tweak.
'if this then that' - a little combination of words I never knew I needed until I started using them!
