IFTTT (If This, Then That) launched an Automatic Channel yesterday – much to my delight.
Automatic (see the Techburgh review here) is a Smart Driving assistant. It essentially retro-fits vehicles, and attaches their onboard computers to your Smart Phone to tell you information about your vehicle and how you drive it.
IFTTT is web based command service. Through IFTTT you can cook up “recipes” for the available channels, to tell something to do something else when something happens.
i.e If This happens Then make That happen.
But what does all this have to do with Nevada and brothels?
Yesterday, as I giddily looked through the pre-cooked IFTTT recipes in the Automatic channel I saw a variety of concoctions – “text this person if I turn on my car”, “send an email to whoever when I turn off my car”, “announce my tailgating if my car is wherever” etc.
Many of these, we’d never use.
My favorite was this though: “Call my spouse immediately if I park in front of a Nevada brothel”
It’s novel, I’ll give them that. Quite why this would have to happen, I’ll (hopefully) never know.
There are some very useful applications though, and they’re really only limited by the available IFTTT Channels and your imagination.
Right now, I have personal recipes set up so that, Automatic notifies me whenever (and wherever) my vehicle is turned on.
It will send a trip summary to my Google Glass and put it into a spreadsheet, telling me the date, time, distance, MPG, cost of trip, LAT, LONG, etc.
I’m seeing interesting developments with Automatic, and Hue. “When I leave work, turn on my lights at home”, “When I get home, turn my house lights to party mode”.
How about “e-mail my mechanic, when my check engine light comes on”?, “Let my parents know when I leave school”?
There are many, many possibilities.
What would you use yours for?
Check out the Automatic IFTTT Channel here
Check out the Hue IFTTT Channel here
Check out the Google Glass IFTTT Channel here
