I am a big, big fan of tools that monitor the Web. Some of my favorites include Google Alerts which I use to track where our stories show up, AreMySitesUp, which I use to keep an eye on Web site uptime, and PriceProtectr which watches for drops and increases from various retailers. Trackle, a service that's coming out of private beta on Tuesday, is hoping to replace all three--and many others--by corralling all of these various alerts into one, large in-box. Is it a keeper? I think so.
Much like competitor Yotify, Trackle lets you peruse a long list of sites to find something interesting to track. Once you do, it has a specially created setup wizard for each site that make setting up a new alert a snap. For example, if you want to track crime in your neighborhood, you simply plug in your street address. The wizard expands to give you options on how big a radius you want to search from, along with what specific crimes you want to be notified about.
The same goes for any other "tracklet" of which there are about 100. Users can rate these tracklets with a one to five star rating, and send feedback for changes. The service also keeps track of which ones are the most popular, which as of this writing is one that tracks stock ticker symbols for pricing and related news.
Trackle's in-box lets you view all your alert news in one place. You can also filter it based on the categories on the left.
(Credit: CNET Networks)I found the service's real power to be in its in-box-centric design. Sure you can get everything forwarded to your e-mail in-box, or phone (via SMS), but the built in alerts in-box is far more powerful. Here you can view everything you're keeping an eye on in one place. It's set up in ascending chronological order, so the newest stuff is always on top. Likewise you can go in and adjust each alert, including whether or not friends can see it, and its notification settings.
Trackle's one weak point is that its social networking is very underdeveloped. You can see what a friend is tracking, but first you'll need the e-mail address he or she signed up with. Likewise, once you've seen what he or she is tracking, you can't actually set up a tracklet for that stream of information, which would let you be alerted to new things they're tracking. Admittedly, this could become overwhelming with a big enough social circle, but it seems like a missed opportunity.
To its credit, the service is integrated with Twitter, so if you can send any item out as a Tweet, or share an entire tracklet to your feed. It will also soon have integration with Facebook. Other upcoming features include a vacation mode where you can suspend all your tracklets for a specified period of time, as well as a location tool that will automatically adjust all your alerts for where you are. A bookmarklet and toolbar are also in the works, which will make it easier to start a tracklet from any site you're on.
Related:
Never have a quiet moment with Alerts.com
Yotify takes too much work
FaveBot is a service that keeps an eye on whatever keywords you give it to pull up related items from the Web. If you're familiar with Google Alerts, the idea is similar. In Favebot's case, you can take any keyword or set of keywords and apply it to the types of content you're looking to keep an eye on, be it photos, videos, blog posts, or podcasts. There are nine categories in all, and the system is designed to serve it up like a river of news with the most recent items appearing on the top.
What's neat about FaveBot is that it uses location as part of the filtering. For example, if you live in Texas and earmark a word like Web 2.0 and opt into the events category, you'll get the heads up on when the service finds local happenings that match up with that category (e.g. SXSW). By adding more types of items on your tracking list, you can increase your chances of seeing them in the main news stream.
Each set of keywords can be dialed in by what type of content you're looking for. Each set also has its own RSS feed.
Besides the river of information that's all mixed up, each keyword you're tracking has its own RSS feed. These can simply be subscribed to in Google Reader or whatever RSS catcher you happen to be using if you feel like skipping the site entirely. Each item also has its own permalink so you can share it with friends in the same place as your other items from that feed, although my guess is that people will simply link back to where the content was originally found.
Speaking of which, the sources are from all over, but there's a blacklist curated by humans. This is an attempt to keep some of the spammy sources from pervading your news stream. The service also recommends you combine three or more keywords together (unlike I did in the screenshot above) to avoid getting irrelevant results. Putting in "Webware" as a keyword in all of the categories brought in a good grouping of related content, although as warned, some items ended up being less focused.
I've looked at a few other services that do similar things but just for news (see Fav.or.it and Tiinker). There's also Persai, a machine learning search tool put together by the guys from Uncov that does a more advanced version of this by putting several keywords together into packages for you and learning what content to serve you based on what you like and dislike. In either case the difference between human recommended content and machine is starkly different, and worth giving a go if you're on the hunt for new content to enjoy.
Yesterday Google rolled out video alerts to its Google Alerts service. If you've never used Alerts, it's a handy way to get Web content updates delivered straight to your e-mail inbox based on keywords. In the case of the new video search, Google will deliver links to videos it's indexed. So how is this helpful? Say you're a big video fan, and you dig seeing those Diet Coke and Mentos videos online. There are always some crazy teenagers out in the suburbs doing new things with them, and that equates to a lot of new videos. Setting up a Google Alert for all the videos of said activity will pass along any new items as they come.
What makes Google Alerts really interesting is its flexibility. Besides videos, you can set it up to scour the Internet in general, blogs, and Google Groups. There's also a comprehensive option that will do all of the above. To keep your inbox from overflowing, you can set up the frequency of alerts, too. There's a simple drop down to select once a day, once a week, and an as-it-happens option that will send you notifications the second Google finds it. Although a word to the wise: You might want to use a spam e-mail account if you've got more than one alert going for a popular topic.
If you're a news junkie, or a fan of using RSS readers, you're likely to prefer using your current system to subscribe to blogs and other news feeds. Luckily for you there's a neat way to take your Google Alert and use it as an RSS feed to simply plug in to your RSS reader. To replicate how this works and put it into your RSS reader, you can do this with a combination of Google's services:
- Web: On Google news, just enter a search term. On the left-hand menu you'll see a link for the RSS feed. Just grab that and plug it into your RSS reader. It will automatically update in your feed reader every time there's new content.
- Blogs: Just like Web search, you'll find the RSS feed link on the left. Copy, paste, and you're done.
- Google Video: Google video search uses the same method. Just do a search, and you'll see an RSS feed logo on the top right, a little bit below where you'd log in. Take it and drop it into your reader.
Interestingly enough there's no RSS feed for Google Groups searches, so you're stuck with an alert. On a related note, if you're a Gmail user and want to keep your alerts super organized, you can set up filters and auto-labeling, which will automatically categorize and index your incoming alerts--keeping them from cluttering your inbox.
Finally, more important than adding feeds is editing and deleting them. You can manage this from your Google account under Alerts. Got tips of your own? Share them in the TalkBack.
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