Saturday, January 19, 2008

Trying Yahoo! Alerts for RSS to SMS

It must be hard to do RSS to SMS. I say this because I haven't yet found anyone who does it well.

I tried Pingie, but all I got from it were ads.

Now I'm trying Yahoo Alerts.
  • It will send an RSS or Atom feed to both email and SMS.
  • The email messages include promotional links for itself, but not other ads.
  • They don't make it easy to sign up for arbitrary feeds - the only way I found to do it was to create an alert button for the fee -
  • It's not that easy to sign up. They support only a small number of cell phone carriers: I had to guess between to AT&T/Cingular services, and then I had to pick a specific model of phone. Mine wasn't listed, so I had to guess at one.
  • It doesn't include the post title in the SMS message, only the content:
y-
alerts@yahool.
com
()Y! Alerts: Long
Time No See, Long
Time No Chat
It's not perfect but that's what I'm using, at least for now.

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