Straight to the punchline
Anything that can be made into a public RSS feed can now essentially be linked directly to your phone. Millions of phones.
Russell Beattie just told the world the real big news from Yahoo yesterday. Wow. I’m well impressed with this. Everything can be made into an RSS feed and Yahoo will now send an update of that feed to your mobile. It’s not a mobile feed reader but it could be a damned handy alert monitor. Scoble mentioned that many servers now spit out error messages as RSS feeds. Very handy for sysadmins. And free!
Some bits from his post. Read it all.
Say you and all your friends or your social group all add alerts for a Yahoo! Groups RSS feed? Now when you post a single message – via email, MMS, or online – alerts go out to everyone in that group automatically. With one email to the list, I’ve sent a mobile text message to everyone.
simply create an RSS feed for anything you want to send off to your users mobile phones, get them to sign up for Yahoo! Mobile and add the alert, and they’ll start getting text messages from your system on their phone immediately. Yahoo! gets more sign ups and more engagement with mobile users, you get free SMS. That’s a good deal for both sides – which is how I know this is a great service.
Unfortunately, it’s US-only, where recipients pay for the texts anyway. I’ll be more excited when it hits Ireland, though 😉
Yes, I was getting fairly excited about it too until I read that it’s US-only at the moment. But one of the commenters pointed to FeedBeep.com which does the same thing, works in Ireland now and seems reasonably priced. I’ve signed up, though I haven’t chosen a plan yet.
This could be extremely useful for me as I’ve channeling as much of my online world into RSS as I can. I think some of the negative responses to Russell’s post are missing the point – this isn’t for news IMHO but for important alerts to server issues, customer queries, forum moderation, etc, etc.
yes,it ‘s very useful for groups.we can send a sms to all the group members
at a time by creating a rss feed,and it’s free.it’s a good deal for both sides –
momax.
great service.