Services such as If-This-Then-That (IFTTT) and Zapier make it easy to connect apps and automate tedious tasks. However they all require you trust your personal data with a third party. Enter Exobrain.

Exobrain is a free and open source framework for extending everything. It’s like IFTTT and Zapier, but you don’t have to reveal your credentials to anyone.

At the time of writing, Exobrain directly supports the following services:

• Beeminder
• Email/Gmail (via IMAP)
• Facebook
• Foursquare
• HabitRPG
• iDoneThis
• Pushover
• [RememberTheMilk][RTM]
• Twitter

For Beeminder users, Exobrain also supports call-backs. This means you can chain events off anything that Beeminder can measure, including Withings scales, Runkeeper, fitbit, Trello, RescueTime, github, duolingo, and more.

If you’re a quantified-selfer, you can automatically record your activities to your log. If you need some extra motivation, you can automatically gain experience points on HabitRPG for achieving your goals. You can back-up all of your activity from third-party websites in real-time, or even allow people to add to your TODO list by tweeting at you with a #todo tag!

If you own a Pebble watch and are a Pushover user, then you can send notifications directly to your watch.

You can use pre-written Exobrain actions or you can write your own. Exobrain is completely free, open source, and extensible. Because it uses a shared message bus, you can even update components on the fly, without having to restart the whole system.

Exobrain is written in Perl and at its core uses an extensible, language-independent, messaging format based on 0MQ and JSON.

Writing extensions for Exobrain is easy; here’s the entire code to send all tweets that mention you to your preferred notify service:

#!/usr/bin/env perl
    use Exobrain;

    $exobrain->watch_loop(
        class  => 'Measurement::Tweet',
        filter => sub { $_->to_me },
        then   => sub {
            $exobrain->notify( $_->summary );
        },
    );

Exobrain is very much a work-in-progress, and we would love your contributions and feedback. You can find Exobrain on github. Contributions to our issues list are especially appreciated!