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"What if you could get an email alert the moment someone posts two tickets to the sold out concert you\u2019re looking for on Craigslist? Or an SMS each time your mom uploads a new photo to Flickr?\nThat\u2019s the idea behind IFTTT, If This Then That, a service that lets you connect two different applications together based on specific parameters, which you define.\n\"I have a deep fascination with design. Not just aesthetic design, but really thinking about how people use products, and then what those products are able to do,\" Linden Tibbets, founder of IFTTT told Mashable. \"Design changes behavior, and people\u2019s relationships to the world and to each other.\"\nAfter getting his start working on video games for EA, Tibbets began working on IFTTT in 2010 by himself in his apartment.\n\"I got really enthralled with how people react to things in the physical world. Everybody the world over is able to have a quick split-second reaction to what a physical object can be used for,\" says Tibbets. \"Those kinds of split-second judgments and reactions are missing from the digital world.\"\nIn a world that is quickly becoming overrun with individual apps focused on specific actions, Tibbets wanted to create a tool that would \"cut horizontally\" through those applications, ultimately giving them all more functionality and making them easier to use.\nWhat IFTTT does\n\nIFTTT lets you create connections between different apps and services through what it calls \"recipes.\" To create a recipe all you have to do is tell IFTTT what the \"This\" and the \"That\" in your equation are.\n\"We enable really simple connections between two things,\" says Tibbets. \nThe service integrates with a number of different applications, such as Facebook, Instagram, Evernote, Etsy and Craigslist, and offers a sizable amount of integration options for each to get you going.\nFor instance, you can ask IFTTT to instantly upload any photos you\u2019re tagged in on Facebook to your Flickr account. You could also set the recipe up to email you if you\u2019re tagged in that photo, or send you an SMS.\nThe service officially launched to the public a little over a year ago, in September 2011.\nWhile Tibbets admits that it\u2019s sort of a \"nerdy tool,\" one of the company\u2019s main focuses is on making it simple enough that anyone can use it. That mission is demonstrated in the first line of the statement IFTTT uses internally to guide its decisions: \"IFTTT enables everyone to take creative control over the flow of information.\"\nChanging Connections\n\nIFTTT is currently used to enable a number of types of connections. \"The reaction has been kind of overwhelming,\" says Tibbets.\nTibbets says some of his employees use the service to share Instagram photos with family members who aren\u2019t on the service. A simple recipe instantly adds all their Instagram shots to a shared folder Skydrive, which their families do use, where they can be viewed.\nIFTTT is even being used to find stolen property.\nThe service can be used to email you when a bike frame you\u2019re looking for shows up on Craigslist. Recently, an IFTTT user had his bike stolen and set an alert up to be emailed if a bike matching its description hit the web \u2014 it did, and he was able to get a notification his stolen bike was on the site, and ultimately got it back.\nContinuing to Grow\n\nIFTTT has grown from a one-man operation in Tibbets apartment to an eight-employee business with an office in downtown San Francisco.\nThe company continues to grow, and plans to expand the service in new ways.\n\"We\u2019re really excited to add some really cool new channels around things we don\u2019t currently address,\" says Tibbets. On deck for the future is sports content, personal finance and ecommerce tools, specifically ways to search for items by price.\nThe company also plans to make its first foray into the mobile world in the near future, in a way that many might not expect.\nWhile just a digital tool now, Tibbets thinks that in the future IFTTT might enable more than just digital tools.\n\"We feel pretty confident that at some point you\u2019re not going to be able to buy anything that isn\u2019t connected,\" says Tibbets. \"The question is 'What are people going to do with all this stuff?'\"\nFor now, the company is work on adding more connections to the service and making the tool simpler and simpler to use.\nDo any of you use IFTTT? Share some of your favorite recipies in the comments.\nImage courtesy of Flickr, accordionguy"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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