If This Then That

The very lovely service If This Then That came out of it’s long beta cycle recently. The service is beautiful and simple in both its design and more importantly its  implementation. As the name suggests it allows you to create actions that occur if something else happens. These are the steps involved.

Click me.

You can create tasks based on triggers from a number of channels. The channels are the usual suspects of the social web

Channels have a selection of pre baked in tasks. Choose one and continue.

Then repeat the cycle for the ‘that’ element of your task.

You then have some more advanced options for the output. Here I am capturing a Twitter Favourite which contains a link to pass the link into Instapaper for me to read later.

Once you have created your tasks you can share them as recipes for others to use.

I love the simplicity and power of this site and what really got me thinking is the lack of this simple rules based operation in the world of banking. Some basic rules might exist for banks around simple notifications such as If my account balance drops below a certain level then notify me. This notification will no doubt be limited to a very small number of channels.

What if banks implemented not only the wealth of triggers shown in ifttt but the linkage to the many services that you already use.  Of course this would need some rather innovative APIs for the banking world with the ability to link outside the organisation and interact with the social web. I can but dream.