Marshall Kirkpatrick: SMS/IM/Email Alerts for RSS Feeds
By Steve Poland • February 19, 2007
Here’s another SMS idea…
Former (yet current) TechCrunch contributor (editor) Marshall Kirkpatrick listed his demands for a SMS/IM/Email alerts system for RSS feeds:
I use services like this extensively, some of which I do pay for. Nobody quite gets it right yet as far as I’m concerned. I would gladly pay a monthly fee for a service that sends me IM and SMS alerts for any number of RSS feeds that I select – if it that company did it right. Here’s what I’m looking for:
1. IM me if I’m online, if I’m not then SMS *and* email me the URL of the feed item if I’m not online (Rasasa and zaptxt each fill different halves of this request)
2. Let me set the hours I want to recieve SMS alerts, outside those hours email me. (rasasa does that)
3. Send me the first 25 characters or however much is possible from the feed item, not just its title (anothr.com does that by Skype IM but no SMS is avail)
4. let me unsubscribe from alerts for a particular feed by responding to a text msg5. don’t send me alerts an hour or two after the item was available – if I select “as soon as it’s available” then send it to me within 15 minutes every time. I hate getting an alert for something only to find that it’s already got 5 comments and 3 trackbacks on it. Experiences like that really mitigate my trust in the service.
6. filter for duplicate URLs, titles or both at my request. (feeddigest can be folded in to existing services if you want to do the leg work)
7. let me exclude particular feeds from my search results. i want to know when my name is used online, for example, but not when it’s in the author field of my own blog.
8. easy integration with Dapper, Yahoo Pipes or some other feed creation tool so I can get alerts from feeds that don’t exist yet would be nice.
9. easy import and export of OPML files.
Is that too much to ask? lol, I trust that if and when more people start using services like this it will be in the interest of vendors to become increasingly sophisticated in what they offer.
See a recent interview of Marshall here.
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2 Responses to “Marshall Kirkpatrick: SMS/IM/Email Alerts for RSS Feeds”
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Thanks for making this a post Steve! I was thinking about doing the same thing myself but you beat me to it. I can only imagine what this means you’re thinking about!
I agree with all of the requests posted there but I would also want a way to filter the notifications I get by subscribing to specific keywords or excluding keywords.
It would also be good to subscribe to feed posts that occur in a specific category of that blog. That way I wouldn’t get notified about administrative type postings that don’t concern me.
Perhaps such a service could have some intelligence built in, if it could somehow track which posts in a feed I actually click through to and read it could learn for the future to only notify me about similar postings. Neural networks to the resuce.