With a few clicks, IFTTT and Zapier automate tasks between web services, using the functionalities of their APIs. Microsoft has also got involved in this niche with Flow, which has just been released in final version.
Keeping a notebook on Evernote containing emails with a certain theme is rather tedious if you do it manually, by boring copy and paste. This is typical of the tasks that we would like to be able to automate. This is possible using services such as IFTTT, Zapier and Flow, which Microsoft has just launched in its final version.
Choice: the functionalities of more than 300 services
The creation of recipes is based on the APIs of the more than 300 online services and platforms that IFTTT intends to interconnect. In addition to Gmail and Evernote, mentioned above, there are Twitter, Facebook, Dropbox, Slack, Spotify or Youtube. The procedure is implemented without having to code any lines. With a few clicks, the user decides which API features he wants to integrate. It is for example possible to choose to systematically save in Dropbox the photos you are tagged in on Facebook. The user could just as easily have decided to save each photo he posted on Facebook, among the ten activators proposed for the social network (the number of options varies based on the compatible services). Whether you use IFTTT in your private life or in the office, for example to boost your productivity, the personalized and quickly learned automation has the enormous advantage of being able to create bridges within an ecosystem of digital services that are ever more numerous and complicated to interconnect without programming knowledge.
More than 100 services dedicated to home automation
Automatically receive a notification to remind you where your car is parked? This has been possible since last January if you have a connected model from BMW. The Internet of Things (IoT) and associated services, which is expanding rapidly, is one of the areas that attracts the most IFTTT users. In Switzerland even more than elsewhere. The firm recently published usage statistics indicating that in our countries, nearly half of users use it to automate processes related to connected objects. That is the highest percentage in the world. The Netherlands, Denmark, Belgium and Austria follow. With a rate of 20%, the United States is in 13th position.
Source: ICT Journal / December 2016 / Netzmedien AG 2016