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.
Types of Alerts
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
Configuring 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
Business Model
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.
