Last night we quietly let ZapTXT Version 2 out into the wild. The service has been re-architected and built from the ground up so we can scale easily and build new services on the platform. This version takes a more holistic view of what monitoring, discovery and messaging needs to look like so that you can be confident that if its important, ZapTXT will find you.

Here’s a rundown of what’s new:

	1. We can find you. Really. Set notifications to IM and tell ZapTXT to forward notifications to Email or your Mobile Device when you are not available. Our presence detection features can tell when your Instant Messenger status is “Idle” or “Offline”. So if it’s really important, use SMS (normal carrier charges apply). If it can wait, choose email so you can get to it when it’s convenient.
	2. Daily Digest You told us that some notifications can wait. So we now enable you to select Daily Digest as a delivery option for a task. We’ll collate all your notifications for that task and send you one email every morning.
	3. Quiet times for SMS Don’t want your phone beeping at night or during a meeting? Use Quiet times to tell us when SMS notifications should stop. Anything you miss will be forwarded to your email.
	4. No alerts, just a river Dig our filtering capabilities but don’t want a notification pushed via IM, Email or Mobile? No worries. Alerts are now optional. You can use the “Latest Tab” to view a river of news for all matches. Or grab the custom RSS feed for each task and port it to your fancied RSS reader (e.g. NewsGator, Google Reader) or start page (e.g. iGoogle, Netvibes)
	5. Multiple Emails Say you want to send critical news about a customer, competitor or LinkedIn network updates to your work email and eBay, Craigslist or FriendFeed notifications to your personal email. Within your settings, add an additional email address. We’ll present your secondary email as an option when you create and edit tasks.
	6. Sharing tasks You could always share a ZapTask. Now you can share a ZapTask as a reading list. Here’s how it works: You create a task, share it as a reading list with friends or colleagues. They subscribe to your ZapTask. Now, every time you add or remove feeds, your subscribers ZapTask will update automatically. Ever try and keep a customer or team member abreast of latest sources that they should monitor? This helps you do it very effectively.
	7. Advanced Search Too much noise? Use our advanced filtering to receive topics mentioned just in the title, exact phrases, written by authors you fancy and more.

Introducing ZapTXT in the Workplace. To add to our publisher solution, we’re also really excited about our new service offering: ZapTXT in the Workplace - An enterprise version of the application that extracts and delivers user defined intelligence from across websites, social media platforms and enterprise systems. The enterprise version is currently available as a SaaS model or as an appliance that you can safely stick behind your firewall and has been successfully implemented for customers. More on this and how specific user groups at our customers are leveraging the platform to improve performance, in a subsequent post. Contact us if you would like to know more.

Finally, ZapTXT now has an API that is ready and is currently available as part of our enterprise offering. We’ll be making it publicly very soon so web applications can offer discovery and notification capabilities via IM, Email or Mobile device to their users. If you’d like to be notified when the API is available, leave a comment below or drop us a line.

With this release we aimed to put in place the required plumbing to allow for reliable tracking, discovery and unified messaging. The social web can be a noisy place and we plan to continue to make it easier for you to focus on topics from sources you trust, discover new sources and rest assured that when the good stuff shows up, we’ll come find you.

Huge props to Eduard, Jane, Paul & Xavier for knocking out the platform over the last few months. Hopefully I’ll be able to convince them to blog often about how good discovery and messaging platforms can be designed, built and kept humming by small, bootstrapped but stellar teams.

Cheers, Sameer

Tags: Announcements

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 18th, 2008 at 4:18 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.