After the DEMO presentations yesterday, a lot of people were discussing favorites sites and services from the day's sessions. Based on buzz alone, one of the more popular applications appears to be the new service Alerts.com. With this service, instead of visiting multiple sites to stay up-to-date with the latest news and and information, you can have the news come to you. You can configure alerts that are relevant to your interests and then have them arrive in the method you choose: SMS, voice, email, IM, or on your desktop via an Adobe Air app.
After signing up for the Alerts.com service, you can choose from all sorts of pre-configured alerts. For example, the site offers alerts for things like news, weather, gas prices, flight info, price watches, CraigsList, sports scores, press releases, birthday reminders, horoscopes, Amber Alerts, and so much more.
However, what really appealed to me was that you had the option to configure your own personalized alerts which could be anything you need to remember to do. I'm also excited to see an RSS Feed Alert option, as well. With this alert, you can monitor feeds for keywords and receive messages immediately or on a scheduled basis via email or SMS.
Types of Alerts
You can see an overview of the different alerts you subscribe to on your personalized homepage, a page which somewhat resembles iGoogle and its gadgets. There's also a handy "list view" which presents the alerts in a list so you can easily sort through them and turn them on or off as desired. This page also displays how many alerts have been sent out so far.
Editing an Alert
Alerts.com is an ad-supported service. Specific advertising is inserted into the emails, texts, and voice messages sent out. The ads will be relevant to the type of alert requested by the user. This doesn't seem like a bad deal to get this sort of useful tool for free.
The platform is open and an API is currently available so that developers can create unique reminders, alerts, and notifications of their own.
The company is currently working with other third parties to expand their reach. Through their partnerships with iSAFE.org and AI Life, they will be able to reach out to 16,000 schools and eight million students in the next year.
You can sign up to start receiving your own alerts today, too. Just click here.
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Comments
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Cool service but I've noticed since I signed up for it that I get automated phone calls at odd hours (read 2am). Maybe it's just me but it really kills the service for me.
Posted by: Mark Roberts | September 9, 2008 9:52 AM
Hi Mark,
I am the QA Manager of alerts.com. We are trying our best to make sure these things don't happen to our users -- what could be more annoying if this happen. One of the feature we have is the ability we have is the ability to turn off all alerts in the Do Not Disturb feature in My Info section to avoid being disturb at the un-wanted time, no matter what user scheduled. With this feature, you can control when you want not to receive alerts and I am sure for everybody, there will be those times.
Another thing we are working hard at is not to have bugs that deliver alerts at un-scheduled time. So if you could give me your user-id by sending an email to tle@alerts.com, we can do some investigation to avoid this issue for you and our users in the future.
Kind regards,
-TL
Posted by: Timothy Le | September 9, 2008 11:04 AM
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Posted by: Robert Lindblad | September 9, 2008 12:13 PM
these guys do great new alerts in australia...
http://www.plugger.com.au
Posted by: Jennifer Edwards | September 9, 2008 3:38 PM
I've been getting the baseball score alert for a few days now. If you like baseball, check it out.
Posted by: Paul Odette | September 10, 2008 3:07 PM
Posted it on my blog.
Very thanx for sharing this info.
Posted by: rajeel | October 3, 2008 6:21 AM