A new service will rescue you from long meetings—and much more

Of course you have—and now there’s an Internet tool that can help.

It’s called If this, then that, and it enables users to automate a variety of tasks on social media sites—among them, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Foursquare, Google Reader, and more—as well as ring your phone or send you a text message.

For instance, let’s say you’re trapped in that endless meeting. You can send a text message to ifttt (as it’s known) with a specific hashtag—such as #help—and the system will dial your phone number. Your phone rings, and you politely excuse yourself from the meeting to take the call.

The platform was introduced in beta last December and opened to the public last month.

Here are just a few more tasks the service enables you to automate:

• Save the tweets you favorited on Instapaper or Delicious
• Capture Facebook photos you’re tagged in by sending them to Dropbox.
• Receive an email or text message if the local forecast calls for rain or snow.
• Log all of your Foursquare check-ins in a Google Calendar. (It could help you keep track of where you’ve been, and if you print your calendar each month to accompany your saved receipts, it would come in handy if the IRS comes calling.)