Website lets you link your web services

— -- Around each corner is a great new Web service designed to make our digital lives easier.

Maybe it's a new way to store your digital music collection. Or maybe it's a new service that tracks your stock portfolio.

But the biggest problem with most of these services is that they don't play nice with others. That can end up making things even more complicated.

We've built a Web of walls — with each new Web site requiring a different login that plays by its own set of rules.

An incredible new Web service looks to change that.

It's called ifttt, and it stands for "if this, then that" —the most basic philosophy of computer programming. (You only have to pronounce one of those T's.)

Basically, users create a mini-Web program that specifies that if a certain condition exists, then the service should carry out an action.

So, you could create a rule on ifttt.com that if you're tagged in a Facebook photo, it should e-mail you. Or you could create a rule that each time you get an e-mail from a very important person — like your boss or mother — you receive a text message.

You could get an alert when your favorite artist has announced a local concert.

You can even set it to send you a text message each time a certain product — say, Xbox Kinect — is posted for sale near you on Craigslist.

Stack your services

The service calls each of these rules recipes, and the website carries a long list of user-generated ones that offer some great ideas.

Users can stack services such as Facebook, e-mail, Flickr, Google Reader and Evernote in near limitless combinations.

The first one I set up sends each Instagram photo I take on the iPhone app to a folder in my Dropbox — a cloud-based storage service.

Another task takes the link contained in each tweet that I favorite on Twitter and sends it to the read-later Web service Instapaper. Then, when I get out my iPad and launch the Instapaper app, those links are there for me to read at my leisure.

The rules I started with on ifttt have already made my Web management a ton easier.

I also started up a rule that will call my phone each time I text-message a certain number — a great way to get a phone call to escape awkward social situations. (Don't take it personally.)

The ifttt.com website lists nearly 5,000 recipes from users.

I'm still on the lookout for a rule to wake me up in the morning, but here's hoping there's one in the works.

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Contact Mark W. Smith: msmith@freepress.com. Follow him on Twitter: @markdubya