I love http://immedi.at and use it all the time to get IM mssgs whenever select RSS feeds are updated. Just learned about another option, http://www.rasasa.com. This one will send you an IM, unless you’re offline. If you’re offline then it will send your cell phone a text mssg, unless you’ve said you don’t want to be texted at the time, then you’ll get an email.

Picture this scenario: environmental watchdog group prepares to do a press conference regarding heinous corporation. Moments before press conference, corporation posts press release trying to preempt watchdogs or otherwise changing the circumstances. Boom, watchdogs get IM or text message with update on new circumstances as they approach the press conference. This capability just seems essential to me. And there are so many other uses possible!

Down sides:

1. Your RSS feeds still have to be well chosen or constructed, including search feeds and scraped feeds if applicable.
2. RSS feeds often get published more than once between new items, for whatever reason. For example, writing this post was interrupted for a second by an IM notification of a “new article” that I had already read just because the feed was republished.
3. Steve Rubel points out that this sort of service would work best if he could set a thresh hold for notification. He’s a PR guy, so he’d like notification when for example 20 bloggers have linked to his client’s site. That makes a lot of sense and seems like something that could be implemented in a number of places along this process.

Tell me if you think I’m crazy, but I love this kind of stuff.

Find blog posts, photos, events and more off-site about:
RSS, IM, SMS, texting, alerts, crisis, monitoring