Tech Tip of the Week: Using IFTTT, Plus a Dozen Recipes to Get You Started

A relatively new web service, IFTTT (If This Then That) lets you automate tasks between other popular services such as Dropbox, Twitter, Evernote, Facebook, Instapaper, and many others. IFTTT works by telling it what task you want carried out, what will trigger this task, and it will put it into action for you.

A common example would be to have your Instagram pictures automatically backed up on your Dropbox or Box account. Certainly useful, but there's also more specific things you can do with it. For example, say I want to keep up with how a certain country is doing in the London 2012 Olympics.

First, enable the ESPN channel, choose the “new Olympic medal by country” trigger, and then select whether you'd like to be alerted via email, sms, tweet this information for you, among many other options.

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