Andreessen partner John O’Farrell, who will be joining the board of IFTTT, wrote in a blog post Thursday why the need for a service like IFTT exists:

“As the Web has evolved, more and more of that online time is spent in specialized venues such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn and Foursquare. While these are fantastic applications, they have a downside, in that they largely exist as parallel, unconnected containers for our personal data. Trapped in their respective silos, our posts, photos, tweets, pins and checkins are largely inaccessible to us from outside. Moreover, creating useful connections between one application and another is far beyond the average user. Sure, most of the most popular web applications now have APIs, but they’re written for the benefit of developers, not people.”

IFTTT, (which is pronounced like “gift” without the “g”), stands for “if this, then that,” and allows users to set actions to occur automatically on the web. For instance, you could set up an IFTTT connection that automatically posts an image to Tumblr when you take an Instagram photo. Or if a particular stock drops to a new level, IFTTT can send the user a text message. Users can create the connections, called “recipes,” with any of IFTTT’s enabled sites, which includes more than 50 companies such as Dropbox, Etsy, Facebook, Foursquare, Instagram, and YouTube.

Users have created more than 2 million different recipes, and more than 3 million are executed every day, O’Farrell wrote. The company is looking to hire new talent to grow the service going forward with the new addition of funding.

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