Notify.me, a service that delivers instant notifications on your favorite topics the way you would like to receive them (i.e. by SMS, e-mail, IM, desktop app or on the web), is adding a new feature next week that should make its die-hard users primarily very happy. The rest of the world will probably care much less.
It’s not that Notify.me at its core isn’t useful, albeit not very unique. For a lot of people, instant updates for anything that has an RSS feed (not only blogs or news sites, but also classifieds listings, for example) with the ability to filter incoming by keyword makes sense, particularly if they need a lot of control over how the updates get delivered based on what the source is. Yet I can’t help thinking that the latest feature the startup is releasing, a browser toolbar, has ‘overkill’ written all over.
What the toolbar does is bring Notify.me’s core functionalities to a persistent toolbar whenever you’re browsing the web. Users can set delivery methods and filter rules directly from the toolbar, and the company has also integrated Ping.fm (which it recently partnered with) and AddThis directly to the toolbar so you can easily share and bookmark websites you’re visiting on a wide variety of social networking services.
Personally, I wouldn’t use this service as I would find it incredibly annoying to constantly have a toolbar on my screen that’s not only persistent but also pings me with new notifications every so often. There’s an abundance of new toolbars launching nowadays, and somehow I don’t think that’s what the next web is all about (quite the contrary, actually). I would love to get your thoughts on this as well.
Similar services include Yotify and Notifixious.
Why is there no reference to twitter in this article? Techcrunch is slipping!
I think they got hacked.
Looks great will try. Features like getting updates on SMS and IM is great to try.
Robin:
I couldn’t agree more. I’m sick and tired of all these toolbars, especially the Diggbar and all other spambars like it. Toolbars should remain within the confines of the browser and not be loaded without the user’s consent.
It’s up to us publishers to stop this by blocking such toolbars from loading on our own sites. Without us they fail to exist. These framebars are the parasites of the web. They do nothing but confuse/annoy the visitor and steal traffic, potential revenue, and content from the publisher. Framing was stopped in the late 90’s because of these reasons. The only difference now is that these frame spammers are repackaging frames as a service and tempting publishers with promises of greater traffic returns if they don’t block their frames. The fact is that publishers can increase their traffic statistics by actually blocking those frames.
“Spambar,” I like it! I’d say everyone should implement breakout scripts, but I think that one of these sites will be sued for tortious interference before then.
I agree, toolbars are a fad with not much future. Maybe it’s just me but I value my screen real estate too much to enjoy these kind of toolbars with limited use. Though I might enjoy something like a Pandora toolbar, but that’s more of an exception and I’d rather just have it as a ff addin.
As long as the framers can steal clicks and stats for a little while during this economic downturn, they’ll be happy with whatever dollars they can squeeze out of it. Even better would be if sites would stop blocking referrers from Digg and the others. Kind of an internet death sentence.
Interesting.. looking forward to using it.
Interesting service, I will look into it. However, I share the sentiment towards toolbars: I haven’t seen a single one that delivers enough value to deserve the screen real estate they steal from my browser.
consider that the value it offers has nothing to do with you. i.e. they don’t care whether you like it or not.
I use it for to track key words in twitter which works awesome.
i gust want to say some thing “great job”
Update your Twitter randomly according to your intrest Or, from Rss Feed Or, from your own tweet message list Or, Any combination of t