Digital

Put Your Digital Stuff To Work


Here is a nice profile of the startup IFTTT. If you have not heard of it, that name is short for “If This, Then That”…get it? If you are like me and have a perverse need to sign up for all sorts of different web sites and web services, then IFTTT is an essential for you. IFTTT basically “connects the dots” between the functionality of all sorts of web services out there and from personal experience, I have to say that it is a fantastic site/service.

Are you an Apple fan boy who has to know what the next free app is available in the App Store, there is an IFTT Recipe for that will send you an email. If you use Instagram and can’t keep track of all the photos you are taking (a big issue for me), there is an IFTTT recipe that automagically pushes your Instagram pix to Dropbox. Another does the same for your “Liked” Instagram pix.

But the true beauty of IFTT is the dead simplicity of it’s site and how easily you can connect seemingly random services. All of those recipes that I mentioned earlier can be set up in about a minute on the IFTTT site.

So if you are feeling like your online life has gotten away from you, check out IFTTT. It may help you reign everything in and help bring order to your universe.

Oh, and here’s one more IFTTT recipe for those of you lucky enough to buy Facebook on it’s IPO day: It will send a Tweet out from your account when Facebook’s stock price reaches it’s $38 IPO price.

Via Forbes.

Kill The Receipt

Thankfully, more and more retailers have enabled the capability to email receipts to customers instead of having to deal with a (gasp!) paper receipt:

To the rubbish pile that the Internet is creating, alongside the road maps, newspapers and music CDs, add one more artifact of consumer life, the paper receipt.

Major retailers, including Whole Foods Market, Nordstrom, Gap Inc. (which owns Old Navy and Banana Republic), Anthropologie, Patagonia, Sears and Kmart, have begun offering electronic versions of receipts, either e-mailed or uploaded to password-protected Web sites. And more and more customers, the retailers report, are opting for paperless.

I have to say that this is one of the most wonderful advances to come to “in store” purchases in, well, forever. Not surprisingly, whenever I make a purchase at an Apple store, having them email me the receipt is one less thing to worry about. I know its in my Inbox and with Gmail’s filters, I can set it up to “automagically” file itself under my “Apple > Receipts” tag/folder. Getting rid of clutter is such a wonderful thing.

via NYTimes.com