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I have no idea what this is about. Can someone enlighten me?

And before you ask, yes, I know what event driven programming is, and how to tie callbacks to actions. I've written large (>1M process) systems that work by callbacks, events, and message passing.

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It seems to me that this is going to be a bit like the Pipes tool from Yahoo, except instead of a data mashup coming out of the combination of multiple services you will instead have some kind of "action" taking place.

From the article: "For instance, you can use Google reader starred items to share images on your Tumblr blog, or customize how and which photos from your Flickr stream show up on your Facebook wall."

So, I guess that ifttt will allow you to define workflows such as:

IF "I star a Google Reader item" THEN "post it to my Tumblr blog"

I can actually see this kind of thing being useful to some people.

Edit: They actually have a WTF page which says what I just said: http://ifttt.com/wtf

Was just about to point you there! Another broad category of use that is emerging is around notifications. ex. IF "I am tagged in a photo on FB" THEN "Call my phone". Its all still in the early going, but we've have seen a lot of interesting uses already. Working on a simple way for others to share the more interesting ones now!

Will there be a way for developers to write their own triggers and actions?

Yes, we are really looking forwarding to being able to open it up as a platform. Working as fast as we can :)