After another update from the very useful (but geeky) betali.st mailing list I have been playing around with the beta of If This Then That. It is a simple idea with a very simple design sentiment - very big and blocky, very black and white.
The concept is that there are lots of different services that you use including Facebook, the Weather Channel, Twitter, SMS and email. You define a trigger. It could be a certain temparature being reached in a defined location or a new posting on a feed or any number of permutations. You then define an action that occurs everytime the trigger is, er, triggered. The action could occur on a different site such as flickr, tumblr or as a service such as an sms or email sent.
There are some shortcomings of the service currently. The services such as weather and stocks are US focused and the SMS and telephone service can only utilise US numbers but there is some hope that this will extend further afield as they come out of beta. Access to the API is also yet to happen.
Some of the trigger services appear to be a bit scary - I was a little bit worried about how much Facebook information I was allowing access to... but the Twitter trigger option opened up a lot of possible options (9) including triggers when a specified persons tweets, when you receive a new mention or a new tweet by you with a specified hashtag. In this case as with a few of the other triggers I was also looking for something a but wider i.e. I would like a trigger when any tweet with a specified hashtag is mentioned - potentially great for uses such as a conference but equally this wider and more general type of trigger could also be dangerously stalkerish.
It is this latter concern that the ifttt.com people will have to be cautious with in developing their preset triggers and in opening up their API. A comment a number of colleagues have already made to me when I described the system. Arguably all of the information that is being accessed is already public other than those services you provide permissions and direct access. However, providing the tools to easily aggregate and alert of individual activity immediately puts this public information into a new and more meaningfully connected package - something that Internet Researchers always have to consider and mitigate against.
On the other hand, the potential for ifttt.com to be a powerful tool for personal management is extraordinary. If more and more services are web-accessible then more and more day to day mundane tasks could be managed automatically (or at least semi-automatically). New triggers such as personal bank balances, household energy and temparature monitoring, traffic monitoring on the route home, expected train arrivals or delays, TV schedules or sports results all offer some interesting opportunities. Of course, if the action to these triggers is a tweet it could raise questions about whether your favourite twitterer is actually a bot. Equally, it offers some interesting tweeting opportunities, "sorry, can't come out tonight money is a bit tight."
There is ultimately a lot of power in taking one of the simplest pieces of logic found in programming (if...then) and applying it to social media, the web and communications as ifttt.com have done. The next step is to take this application of logic and applying it to actual lifestyle decisions and activity. What could a web system be capable of if it applied other forms of programming logic? While or For loops? Case statements? What about other potential triggers?
