Using "If This Then That" to manage Globus Online activities

If This Then That (www.ifttt.com) is an intriguing new service for managing and integrating social media. It lets you specify simple rules of the form:

if <this event> then do <that action>

...where <this event> may be something like arrival of an email, a local weather forecast of rain, or a new blog post on Tumblr, and <that action> can be something like send an SMS message or an email, or post to EverNote or Facebook.

When I first came across this (thanks Cameron Neylon for the pointer), I was immediately interested to see how I could use it with Globus. I first tried a simple rule that emails me whenever someone writes a Twitter tweet containing the string "globusonline." That took about 20 seconds:

Then I decided I wanted SMS notification of my Globus Online task completions. That was easy too: I just needed to watch my GMail account for emails from notify@globusonline, and SMS my cell phone. That took about 10 seconds to set up:

And finally, to be more ambitious, I decided that I wanted to keep a record of all my transfers in a Tumblr blog. That took probably a minute, because I first had to sign up up for Tumblr. I should have used EverNote, which I already have. I wasn't thinking.

You can see the result at iantfoster.tumblr.com. It would be good to format those messages more nicely, which I don't know to do yet. But it's certainly a useful start.

I hope that some other Globus Online users will give IFTTT a try, and suggest other ways of using it. Also, think about how Globus Online can be changed to make integration with IFTTT work even better.