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

December 14, 2011   |  Ian Foster

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:

if new tweet from search for globusonline then send me an email at ianfost@gmail.com, email when globusonline tweet seen

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:

if new email fro notify@globusonline.org then send me a text message, notify me via SMS when Globus Online sends me a message

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.