If This Then That, or How IFTTT Changed my Life

Today we have another guest post.  Lou Plummer is the Mac/iOS specialist for a school district in NC. In the early 90s he helped Al Gore invent the Internet. Lou does not know how to turn on any computer running Microsoft Windows.

We don't just read on the Internet today. We participate in the Internet. We use it to store data, to interact with our friends and family, to tell the world what we're doing, to inform us, and every day there is an opportunity to discover some service we didn't know existed. The variety of opportunities available create one big problem. How do we tie all of this together? How do we keep a record of our tweets, our Facebook posts and our Foursquare check ins? How do we keep track of our photos and our documents? Are our documents on Google Drive or Dropbox? Are our photos on Flickr or somewhere else? What in the world would we do if one of these services suddenly and spectacularly went out of business with our stuff lost forever?

The answer is simple and it's free. It's easy-to-use, requires no highly technical skills and certainly doesn't require any programming ability. Allow me to introduce If This This Then That (https://ifttt.com) where, using set it and forget it rules, users can tie social networking sites together, back up data between cloud storage sites and have information brought to them via email and SMS messages.

IFTTT (If This Then That) has a library of what it calls recipes to make things simple for users. Here are some recipes I use:

1. If I post a picture on Instagram, the picture is also Tweeted to my Twitter account.
2. If I take a picture with my iPhone, it automatically backs up to Box.com
3. If I use a certain label on a message in Gmail, a note with the contents of that message is created in Evernote.
4. Every time I post to Facebook, the contents of my post are appended to a note in Evernote.
5. If I leave a reminder for myself through IFTTT, I get a text every Thursday morning telling me to put my trash cans by the road.

The number of IFTTT channels (calls the variety of web and information services it ties together) currently exceeds 50 with more being added on a regular basis. In addition to the channels already mentioned some popular sites include: Craigslist, Etsy, ESPN, The New York Times, Tumbler, LinkedIn and on and on.

You may find yourself investigating new web services just to take advantage of IFTTT's capabilities.