Recently, I heard about a service called "If This Then That" or "IFTTT" while listening to the Mac Power Users podcast. IFTTT is a free automation service that can do a lot of things for you online, automatically.
On their site, there are a bunch of building blocks to help you create automated actions, along with a whole collection of "recipes" other people have created that you can just use for your own purposes. Some examples of recipes:
- When Facebook profile picture changes, update Twitter profile picture
- If its raining tommorow, send me an email!
- Thanking people in Twitter when they mention you or RT (note: this is a bit of overkill - I tried it for a few hours - it was too much)
- star ★ a Gmail, send it to Evernote
And there are a whole lot more. I am still an IFTTT novice, but I have stuck with one recipe I really like:
Since I've started using this recipe, every morning I get an email that tells me 10 current events or relevant news stories that I can use to seem "up" on current events. The stories tend to be a bit technology biased, but that is a perfect fit for me. For example, the one I got this morning was:
Of course, this information is available on a "Business Insider" web page, but I love having it waiting there piping hot in my inbox every morning so I don't have to remember to go to the Business Insider site to catch up on things.
As I mention, I'm a newbie with this so I'm just scratching the surface, but this particular automation "recipe" has made me hungry for more. If you find a recipe you really like, please drop me a line and let me know about it.