Notify.me - This is a notification service that alerts you of any new content that’s added to an RSS feed. I’ve used Yahoo! Alerts, Yotify, and Google Alerts prior to testing and I can say without a doubt that Notify.me beats them all hands down in terms of the least amount of lag time. Using a test blog I measured the elapsed time between the instant an article was published to the RSS feed and the actual time the notification was received from Notify.me. In three separate tests, Notify.me alerts were delivered within one to four minutes after publishing. This is extremely fast in comparison to the others listed below and why Notify.me is an excellent tool for following favorite blogs for which you are interested in commenting as well as other feed based content that is extremely time sensitive. Notify.me can be used for other things such as tracking items on eBay or Craigslist, receiving automatic notification of new job posts, following breaking new stories, and much more. Alerts can be sent to you via SMS, email, instant messaging, or via Notify.me’s own Adobe AIR application.
Yahoo! Alerts - Yahoo! Alerts permits you to set alert notifications for all sorts of content including all of the following:
- Amber/Missing Children
- Avatars
- Breaking News
- Daily News
- Fantasy Sports
- Farechase India
- Feed / Blog
- Games
- Health News
- Horoscope
- HotJobs
- Keyword News
- Local News
- Market Summary
- Movie Recommendations
- Snowfall
- Sports
- Stocks
- The Apprentice
- Traffic
- Travel Destinations
- Weather
- Yahoo! 360
However, it is not nearly as fast to update you about new content added to an RSS feed and it usually takes nearly an hour or more to actually receive notification of such things. Thus Yahoo! Alerts maybe more helpful for things such that are not as time sensitive or for which you do not need lightening quick alerts.
Google Alerts - The same can be said about Google Alerts in that in order to receive notifications from Google about new published content, it must first be indexed by the search engine which many not occur for several hours at least. However, it can be a great asset for monitoring your online reputation or your blog’s feed. For instance, I’ve added a simple code into my RSS feed on this blog and I have an alert set that matches it so that Google Alerts will notify me any time it appears. Thus if someone ever tries to scrap or steal my feed based content and publish it as their own, I’ll be alerted of it and can easily find the culprit via Google’s excellent search engine. Other uses for Google Alerts include keeping up to date with your favorite sports team, monitoring competitors, following breaking news stories, and more.
Yotify - Another notification alerts service that can be used to simply monitor a blog for new posts or track other things such as product prices, ticket availability for events, modifications of a user’s profile on social networking sites (i.e. LinkedIn), keyword searches, and Friendfeed alerts.
TweetBeep - Permits you to establish alerts for words that appear on Twitter. You can set the alerts to occur hourly or daily and they can be based on any keywords or phrases and may be limited to certain people, places, attitudes, or whether or not the tweet includes links.
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Kevin, You can add Trackle.com to your list too. It was launched last month and its its a cool web based tool to track alerts. It consolidates all kinds of info - local, news, shopping, blogs - free
Here are some of the features:
1. Trackle store specials
Find out about deals and sales from over 500 stores to get great prices on products you’ve got to have.
2. Trackle product price drop
Trackle dozens of online retailers for a product you want to buy and find out when the price meets or beats your target price.
3. Trackle deals on Amazon
Trackle items on Amazon to find out when their prices falls within a price range you’re willing to pay.
4. Trackle new product reviews
Know what people are saying about that gadget you are considering, from digital cameras to cell phones and laptops.
5. Trackle for sale on craigslist
Like buying things because they’re good deals? Let us monitor craigslist for you and you’ll be the first to know when those free items and other great deals post.
6. Trackle daily deals
Trackle daily deals from dealnews and Ben’s Bargains and snag that deal before it disappears.
7. Trackle deals on Shopping.com
Trackle prices from thousands of online merchants to find the best deal for an item you’re seeking.
8. Trackle price protection
Keep track of purchases from retailers who offer price protection and find out if the price of a recent purchase drops in time to apply for a rebate or partial refund.
Trackle also allows you to track many more topics on the internet. The URl is http://www.trackle.com
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