The reasons to browse the web are many but often it is to check the status of something or find out more about something and ultimately do something about it. For example, one of the most often used ones is to probably check the weather. What we want to know is “whether it will rain today”? And if you have stocks in the market then the obvious one is to find out how are the stocks doing. But, the real interesting part is what you want to do about it?
For simple questions, the result might be to just know. To continue the previous example, the real question is whether I want to carry an umbrella? The weather lookup on the internet just serves to get that question answered. So, it would be great if you could get your question answered before even asking. What if you got your email early in the morning, that tells you “Take your umbrella today”. It could be an urgent SMS or text or even a big display that comes on your remote. Another one could be that we want to update something (tweet, facebook, linked-in) on the internet based on something else.
There are many such decisions that we make everyday based on the status of the things that we see. However, many of them require manual intervention. Any automated way to change or correct that requires a person to be a programmer or even an expert in Java, Scripting or complicated routines. A web service called IFTTT hopes to relieve this burden. They have created simple interfaces and scripts that enable you to create actions on the internet linked to specific tasks that we perform. They have scripts that send tweets, turn on lights in your home if you have a Belkin device or even suggest you to buy stocks based on your triggers.
Combine that with other devices that we interact with everyday and now you have saved a small iota of time and made the internet and devices much more useful for us.
