RSS readers may make it easy to quickly browse through all of your favorite news sources, but they can quickly become overwhelming – many of the most popular blogs publish dozens of posts a day. Notify.me is looking to help cut through the noise by offering keyword filtering for blogs and other sites that support RSS (like Craigslist), and the ability to send immediate update notifications across a variety of services.
Notify.me allows users to create a list of RSS feeds they’d like to monitor for a set of specific keywords. Whenever one of these keywords appears in a story, Notify.me can alert them through SMS, Email, instant message, or through a desktop application. Users can also receive immediate updates from their social networks, including Facebook and LinkedIn, by switching their social network account’s email address to [user]@notify.me
While creating an account is easy, the site itself is more barebones than it should be. The default list of available RSS feeds only offers one source for each category – something that was likely done for simplicity, but sort of defeats the point of being able to monitor a wide variety of sources for a single subject. The site does offer a bookmarklet for adding more feeds to your account later, but it would benefit from a broader selection and more intuitive interface.
Notify.me shares many similarities with Yotify, another customizable alert startup that we covered in September that was described as “Google Alerts on Steroids’. For more on Notify.me, check out its profile on Go2Web20 here.