IFTTT

If you haven't tried IFTTT (IF This Then That) you might be missing out on something totally awesome! It's an impressive service that connects Facebook, Google, Twitter, stock prices, Wemo, SmartThings, push notifications, and many other services together.

There are two important T's in IFTTT, "This" and "That". The other important piece is what's known as a recipe which determines how "This" communicates with "That".

"This" is the service that you want to listen for an event on. It could be when a door opens at your house, a tweet with a certain hashtag arrives on your feed, an e-mail arrives that matches a certain criteria you set, you get the idea the possibilities are numerous. When an event occurs on "This", the recipe gets involved.

The recipe controls the communication between the other services. It can be looked at like a switchboard. Imagine a phone call comes in to the switchboard operator who then connects the caller to the appropriate jack to complete their call. The main difference between a switchboard and an IFTTT recipe is that you get to call the shots. You choose the service event to listen for and what service to route it to.

"That" is the receiver of the event from "This". It might be to post a message on Facebook, turn on/off a light, (un)lock a door, send a text message, or a number of other things. Depending on the type of data the "This" event sends, options might be presented that allow customizing of the output to the "That" service.

Here is a visual example below of it all put together. The stock service waits for the event of "stock ticker DDD drops below $55", as soon as that occurs it pushes a note to my phone with the details using Pushbullet, the receiving service.

I currently only have a few recipes on my account. As soon as I've built up a good collection of some that I find really neat I'll put a link to them here. Go ahead and give IFTTT a try and let me know what awesome recipes you come up with in the comments section below.