Yesterday, we put out TWO new products. One was the much blogged about/talked about RSS Reader in the new Yahoo! Mail. The other, was the ability to get IM, SMS or Email alerts to any RSS Feed out there. We call it Feed/Blog Alerts and its live now on http://alerts.yahoo.com/
If you have never used Yahoo! Alerts, its a service that allow you to get real-time updates sent to your mobile phone, email or Yahoo! Messenger with triggers you specify like: Stock prices go above/below a limit, your favorite sports team wins/loses a game, the snow at your favorite Ski resort is perfect, etc…
So it made a lot of sense to want this feature: “send me an alert whenever this RSS feed updates”. And that’s what we launched yesterday. It works with ANY RSS/Atom/RDF feed so that means you can get notified of pretty much whatever you want.
So there are lot of cool ways to use Feed Alerts, but I’ll share with you how I’ve been using the service (I’ve been testing it for about a month now):
- Blogs that update infrequently – I don’t like to clutter up My Yahoo! with feeds that don’t update too often, so I subscribe to an email alert for those feeds. If that feed only updates once every few weeks, I’ll get it by email when it does.
- Stuff I need to know right away – like a Craigslist search for something I’ve been hunting around for a while or today’s sale on Woot!.
- My own blog’s comment feed – ok so maybe I’m a little too new at this, but I love to know when I have comments, send it right to my phone please!
How will you use it? Let me know in the comments.
Also, since it was popular on the mail post, here are some screen shots, be sure to go check it out at http://alerts.yahoo.com/ …
Yahoo! Alerts Home Page
(see the Feed/Blog BETA option)
The Signup Screen
(you can enter the feed URL, or pick from your MyY! choices, also note you can pick the delivery options like “as it happens” and email, messenger, mobile)
Yahoo! Messenger Alert
(for a Yahoo! News RSS feed)
Alert via Email
(this one is a daily digest of all updates from RotoWire’s RSS feed
So anyway, take a look. After a few days using it, I think you’ll find yourself moving some feeds out of your aggregator and into alerts.
Also, stay tuned, we’re working on an integration of the Add to My Yahoo button and alerts, so you can get your users to signup for alerts right from your site.