If This Then That

An interesting site that I stumbled upon is iftt.com. The URL stands for “if this then that”. The site is designed to monitor various social sites for you and if one thing happens, trigger another.

In it’s simplest form, it can monitor the Weather Channel for your location and send you a text if it’s going to rain tomorrow.

But with “channels” including most of the major players (Craigslist, Facebook, Twitter, FourSquare, Gmail, LinkedIn, WordPress, YouTube, Instapaper, and a bunch more), the combination of things you can trigger becomes more interesting.

And you can post a “recipe”, which is a template for how to monitor something, that other people can then use. Makes the site easier and also gives good ideas.

For example, there’s a recipe where you can automatically tweet a “welcome” tweet as a direct message to anyone who starts following you. Kind of cool. If you are tagged in a Facebook phote, it could be automatically saved to your DropBox. I could automatically tweet every new blog post (would that be annoying or cool?).

You can even tell it to give you a wake up call every morning.

Truthfully, I’m not sure how much I’ll use it. But it seems pretty cool…