IFTTT - What is it?

Welcome fellow readers to another edition of El Toro’s Tech Blog.

I came across a pretty cool tool that I have been using for quite some time and I figured you may enjoy this.

The tool is called IFTTT, which stands for If This Then That. Their slogan? Put the internet work for you.

In short, you set conditions on anything you want to do if something happens.

For instance, I love taking pictures from my smartphone and I post them online (Instagram, Facebook, etc). I want to make sure I get a copy of the photo saved somewhere if I ever lose my phone. With IFTTT, I can tell it to do the following:

“If I post a picture on Facebook, send me a copy to my Gmail”

See? How cool is that? IFTTT has several apps you can connect with to set your conditions, known as Triggers.

I will admit it takes some time to get the hang of things. fortunately for us, people have done most of the work for us. Each task is called a Recipes and most of the users share their recipes. We just activate the channel (apps) we wish to use and make the necessary changes. The recipes are checked every 15 mins and if there is anything new, it will get triggered for you without any intervention on your part.

How cool is that?=)

Another example is this. I set a recipe to trigger whenever I leave work (I provide an address) it sends a text message with the time of departure saying I left work.

There are a number of things you can do to make your life a bit easier. And here is the best part, its available for your Android or Apple devices!

The possibilities are endless. You might want to have all pictures that are posted on Facebook with a specific hashtag saved to your Dropbox, or have a text sent to you when it is going to rain so you know to take an umbrella, well … you get the idea.

Check it out now … IFTTT. It’s free and if you don’t like it, close your account. I am confident you will love it.

That’s all for today. Thanks for reading and until next time, Be Safe! =)