RivalMap, the collaboration tool designed to help businesses keep tabs on their competitors, has introduced News Feed updates. Through a partnership with Newsgator, the site will monitor RSS feeds around the web for mentions of specific company names and keywords.
Companies can choose to either monitor specific news feeds, or they can have NewsGator report a keyword’s mention on any blog. While the site supports tagging to help weed out noise, all tags must be manually assigned to feeds (RivalMap plans to integrate automatic tagging in the future).
The news updates will be a welcome addition to the site, but they aren’t exactly unique. Similar “Tweetscan for RSS” functionality can be found on Google Alerts, but the integration alongside RivalMap’s other collaboration tools should make them more effective.
As part of the site upgrade RivalMap is also slightly changing its interface to facilitate the sharing of information that isn’t necessarily directly related to competitors – it wants to be a source of market intelligence, not just competitor intelligence. Users will notice a number of subtle changes around the site, including improved tagging and social bookmarking features.
LinkedIn also offers a newsfeed of competitor information, though it obviously doesn’t have the same collaboration tools.
