How to Use ‘Digital Duct Tape’ to Combine Your Web Services

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The latest invitation-only webapp to get the geeks excited goes under the snappy name of IFTTT, aka If This Then That.

Think of it as digital duct tape. A Rube Goldberg machine for connecting up all the other web services you use.

The idea is that you set up rules, based on triggers and actions culled from your activity on those other services.

A trigger might be something like “When I post something new on my YouTube channel”, and the corresponding action might be “Post a link to it on my Twitter account.”

Or you might have a rule that emails your mom every time you post on Facebook, because Mom isn’t on Facebook. Yet.

All these triggers and actions are pulled from IFTTT’s list of channels, which connect it to an impressive list of webapps and web services. They include Gmail, Facebook, Foursquare, Flickr, Instagram, WordPress, Tumblr and YouTube.

The team who built IFTTT came up with the phrase “digital duct tape”, but they also call it “event-driven programming for the masses”. Or to put it another way:

“Much like in the physical world when a 12 year old wants a lightsaber, cuts the handle off an old broom and shoves a bike grip on the other end, you can take two things in the digital world and combine them in ways the original creators never imagined.”

That’s what IFTTT is all about. If you combine Thing 1 from one website, and Thing 2 from another, what interesting, useful, automated new Things can you create? The more you think about it, the more intriguing the possibilities become.

Want to join in the fun? You can, but for the time being it’s invite-only. Click the Get Yours! link on the IFTTT home page and ask for one – they probably have a set of rules running in the background to take care of it.