New or little known Web 2.0 sites and/or technologies

Wow... So it's the final week of CS 135. Kinda sad. I guess this will be my last blog entry for the class. So this week is another light week so we can work on our term projects. But our assignment for the week is to investigate some new or little known web 2.0 technology and post a link to it with some comments. I used go2web20.com (which I have to say awesome) to find a cool little site called ifttt.com. Here is the what I posted to the course wiki:

"ifttt.com or “If This Then That” is a new web 2.0 technology that is currently in beta. The idea of ifttt.com is that it puts the internet to work for you by creating tasks out of relationships between other web 2.0 technologies. You can define when something happens (this) something else will automatically occur (that). So users basically set up “triggers” and “actions” with the different channels they use such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Email, Dropbox, Evernote, Google Calendar, Soundcloud and dozens more. When you create a linked function between tasks it’s called a recipe. A recipe may look something like this :

if instagram then dropbox

After you set “If This Then That” functions they will poll for new updates every 15 minutes and complete the “thens” for any “ifs” that have occurred. There are a lot possibilities for functions when using ifttt.com. A few more examples are when facebook profile picture updates update Twitter profile picture, or when a track is loved on last.fm then post the link to Facebook. There are literally thousands of premade recipes to use or you can make your own. It’s really pretty cool."

So I do think that this technology is cool. Of course it's not the most necessary thing on the web, but the idea that we can automate many repetitive functions is nifty. I'm not really sure where this is taking us but I think we will be seeing more automatic type functions from our computers and devices in the future. It will be interesting to see where it goes.