IFTTT: A Customizable Robot to Help You Automate Your Online Activities (With Invitation) | ZFreet CHeung

ifttt - If This Then That is a truly magical website that only began its Beta testing in May. Its concept is refreshingly novel, allowing users to automatically execute various online actions based on self-defined trigger conditions. As its slogan states: "Put the internet to work for you." It's akin to having a highly functional robot that can manage all sorts of online tasks for you once you've pre-set some conditional statements.

This morning, I received an invitation from the official team and tried out this robotic service. It was indeed refreshing, and I successfully sent out a test tweet: "a test tweet from ifttt, awesome!"

Looking at its Channels (channels) page, it currently supports 33 services including websites, software, SMS, phone calls, etc., which basically cover most of your online activities. Under each service, there are multiple Triggers (trigger conditions) and Actions (automatic behaviors) available for selection and combination, covering almost all possible uses of the service. For example, consider the following official example:

If user "ltibbets" adds a bookmark with the tag "tweet" on Delicious, then automatically send a new tweet from the "@ltibbets" account (the content of the tweet can also be freely set).

You can imagine, with the cross-combination of these 33 different services, how many variations you can create... However, there is always a catch. Although you can combine them freely, each Task (task) can only include one "this" and one "that," and currently, you are only allowed to create up to 10 Tasks for free (which is clearly a monetization point). But this is more than enough for personal use.

For instance, it’s easy to think of setting up a dedicated GTalk 2 Twitter robot or a robot that sends tweets via SMS; similarly, sending SMS through GTalk or making phone calls via Twitter are also possible.

By the way, another GTalk 2 Twitter robot "TwiTalker" that I recommended a long time ago is still working fine.

Looking ahead, domestic versions inspired by this idea will likely appear soon. As long as certain products aren't overly closed-off, features like posting on Sina Weibo via QQ or posting on Tencent Weibo via 360 could become possible. If the era of the Internet of Things arrives sooner, such customizable services will have even crazier development prospects...

Finally, here's the invitation. I suggest applying directly on the official site first since there are limited invitations—currently, I only have 5. Here's a new rule: leave a comment below, and the first five comments containing the number "1" in a prime-numbered floor should include an email address.