Always Know When Someone's Talking About You Online with IFTTT

Too many accounts, too little time. If this sounds like the story of your life, you're not alone. That's where If This, Then That (IFTTT) comes in. It's a site that lets you automate tasks in 50 different channels including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Craigslist, WordPress, YouTube, and even your own phone and email accounts.

It works by using "recipes," an infinitely customizable list of tasks that you can set up to do almost anything you want. Want to know when someone mentions you on Twitter? You can have IFTTT email, text, or notify you in any way you want. You can even ask it to automatically thank them for you.

It's not just for social media, though. Get weather notifications, automatically back up your tweets and photos to Dropbox, or have it send all the links in your inbox to your Google Reader.

The possibilities are endless, and there's a recipe for almost anything. And if it doesn't already exist, you can create your own custom recipe to do whatever you want.

Do you use IFTTT? If so, what does it do for you?

Cover image by Old Geordie