Real-time RSS updates

Setting your RSS newsreader to ping your subscribed feeds every five minutes just isn’t fast enough for you, eh? You might want to try a new free product from a company called KnowNow. eLerts—which is beta (of course; what isn’t?)—installs a button to your Internet Explorer toolbar. Once installed, it synchs up with a background service that that monitors your feeds. As soon as a feed is updated, you get an alert on your toolbar. Adding subscriptions is a matter of dragging one of those ubiquitous orange boxes into the “add channel” field on your toolbar—no need for a newsreader. It’s not an aggregator, though; clicking on an alert takes you to the website that contains the new content. I suspect it’s best for feeds that are critical, not the 1,500 you review every morning; it complements instead of replaces a newsreader.

eLerts is only available for the PC, and I’m on the road with my PowerBook, so I’ll install this on my desktop when I get back to the office so I can take it out for a spin. You’re also out of luck if you use only Firefox, although I suspect that a Firefox version is inevitable if the product takes off. As for a business model, KnowNow plans to offer branded versions for companies.

PC Magazine story on eLerts

1. I am glad you explained KnowHow…cause there website has obviously been written by marketing guys who are not using the products they are pushing…it is full of corporateeeezzz that the target group is not going to understand. Good concept though…I wouldn’t like to be in the RSS aggregator business.

   Posted by Jonathan Marks  on  10/07  at  05:51 AM