Hacking the Web

If This Then That (IFTTT)
There are lots of Internet services out there. YouTube. Instagram. Flickr. Twitter. WordPress. And so on. What you may not know is that each service has capabilities that are hidden from the average user. Behind all of the services I mentioned there is something called an API or Application Programming Interface. What an API does is give you access to bits of the service so that you can program additional functionality. Specifically, you can use an API to get two different services talking to each other.

Now most people don't know about APIs because they aren't programmers, and diving into an API is not for the faint of heart. That's where a service like If This Then That (IFTTT) comes in. IFTTT helps give non-programmers access to the APIs without knowing how to program. So for example, I want to send any video that I add to my Favorites list on YouTube to my WordPress blog and automatically create a post. I would use the IFTTT service to create a "recipe". You need to activate what are called "channels", but once you've done that you have lots of functionality to have services talk to each other and accomplish "Internet Macros". Here's a screencast of the example that I mentioned:

XfNyW-QqtDA|640|360

Explore some of the other sample recipes and see all the amazing possibilities.