My ongoing list of feature requests for the perfect RSS to IM/SMS alert system got longer this morning. Last night I got a pretty darned fast notification of the NBC/Newscorp partnership story in LA Times – which is great, but now my alert for YouTube in the news is ringing off the hook with follow up coverage of the same story. I’d like to be able to tell Zaptxt to pause that particular alert for like 24 hours, then turn it back on. I’d turn it off, but I don’t want to forget to turn it back on again once this story has passed.

To be honest, I’m also not very happy that it took an hour for Zaptxt to bring me the story in the first place. Mashable and PaidContent already had it. I’ve got the service set to alert me “as soon as possible” so why did it take an hour? I’ll go on the record right now and say I’d pay $25 or something every month for my monitored feeds to be pinged every 5 minutes. That’s not a mass market service or price point, so it shouldn’t be too much to ask for.

Here’s my previous list of feature requests:

1. IM me if I’m online, if I’m not then SMS *and* email me the URL of the feed item if I’m not online (Rasasa and zaptxt each fill different halves of this request)
2. Let me set the hours I want to recieve SMS alerts, outside those hours email me. (rasasa does that)
3. Send me the first 25 characters or however much is possible from the feed item, not just its title (anothr.com does that by Skype IM but no SMS is avail)

4. let me unsubscribe from alerts for a particular feed by responding to a text msg
5. don’t send me alerts an hour or two after the item was available – if I select “as soon as it’s available” then send it to me within 15 minutes every time. I hate getting an alert for something only to find that it’s already got 5 comments and 3 trackbacks on it. Experiences like that really mitigate my trust in the service.
6. filter for duplicate URLs, titles or both at my request. (feeddigest can be folded in to existing services if you want to do the leg work)
7. let me exclude particular feeds from my search results. i want to know when my name is used online, for example, but not when it’s in the author field of my own blog.
8. easy integration with Dapper, Yahoo Pipes or some other feed creation tool so I can get alerts from feeds that don’t exist yet would be nice.
9. easy import and export of OPML files.
Is that too much to ask? lol, I trust that if and when more people start using services like this it will be in the interest of vendors to become increasingly sophisticated in what they offer.