Tip of the Week: IF This Then That (IFTTT) - Connect Your Services

IFTTT is a free web-based service that people use to create chains of simple conditional statements, called applets. An applet is triggered by changes that occur within other web services such as Gmail, Facebook, Instagram, or Pinterest. An applet may send an e-mail message if the user tweets using a hashtag or to copy a photo on Facebook to a user's archive if someone tags a user in a photo

IFTTT helps you connect the services in your life. Most of the things that you use on the web is a service. There are a broad range of services that are available on IFTTT that you can start using right away. Each service has a set of triggers and actions. We can create applets which wire up triggers (if this) of one service to actions (then that) of another service.

There are a lot of pre-created applets available for immediate use. You can also create custom applets that wire up the triggers and actions of services of your choice. For e.g. Whenever a new item is available on my blog RSS feed I send an email to Buffer. The email to Buffer triggers it to share the post to all my connected social media accounts.

If you are consuming the services of IFTTT, then it is free to use. Paid plans are for publishing your service and making it available for others to consume. IFTTT also has apps for iOS and Android. With the apps you can also use the mobile capabilities like location, messages, etc. to trigger actions.

Start connecting the dots between your services and get the web to work for you.