After Olympics pilot, IFTTT launches ESPN channel to help you track sports, teams, scores and more

Today, IFTTT is announcing a partnership with ESPN to offer triggers for breaking sports news surrounding teams and more. The new channel uses ESPN’s API and offers new ways for sports lovers to stay up to date via any outlet they choose. We’ve covered the cool digital glue service IFTTT several times before. It allows you to hook various web properties up with notification options like email, SMS and more. The triggers and actions that you combine to create recipes on IFTTT let you push data around the web and out to physical devices like phones, USB dongles and any other internet-connected device. For sports fans, this means saving news about their teams automatically to read later services, getting a text update of quarterly scores and more. Back in July, IFTTT partnered up with ESPN to launch an Olympics channel, but the genesis of the ESPN connection actually started earlier than that. I spoke to IFTTT CEO Linden Tibbets about the ESPN connection. “Actually, it started about a year before the Olympics,” Tibbets says. “Someone on ESPN’s API team, actually a few people there, got into a private beta of IFTTT.” The team recognized the potential of what IFTTT offered: a way for sports fans (some of the most data hungry folks on the planet) to get notifications in far more ways than ESPN could offer itself. “We got nothing but positive feedback from people,” Tibbets says of the Olympics channel, which served as a pilot