IFTTT gains New York Times channel to help automate news delivery -- but Pipes it ain't

Web automation service IFTTT just gained itself a new channel, adding support for no lesser an establishment than the New York Times. This means that if you don’t want to have to keep checking the NYT website to see when there is a new article in the Science section, you no longer need to. In a couple of steps it's possible to create a recipe that will send you an SMS, email or some other form of alert.

As with many of IFTTT's other channels, the New York Times has various possible triggers. In addition to the addition of an article to a particular section, recipes can also check for popular' articles, Critic's Pick movie reviews, new additions to the Best Sellers list and the addition of new events.

But perhaps the most useful trigger is the one that can be used to send out an alert -- or perform some other action -- when an article matching your specified search terms is found.

The channel may have just gone live, but there are already more than 70 readymade recipes to choose from, and this is a figure that's likely to increase over the coming days.

IFTTT continues to grow, both in terms of the number of online services it supports and the number of users. Its popularity can be attributed, at least in part, to its undeniable ease of use. It may not be the most powerful web automation site out there, but it is probably the one that is easiest to get started with.

But, for me anyway, IFTTT will always remain the poor cousin of the oft-overlooked Yahoo Pipes. Yes, there is a steeper learning curve -- there's no getting around that -- but it is infinitely more flexible. Lending itself to so many applications, I've whiled away many a happy hour creating the ultimate custom newsfeed -- and it's something I've implemented on my own website to automatically pull in stories from the various websites I write for; it saves me from having to manually post links to my work.

That's not to say IFTTT doesn’t have its place. It's still something I've been known to turn to, and I've even used it in conjunction with Pipes. It's user-friendly automation for the masses, and that's not something to be sneered at.