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

Allan Hoffman wrote an article on NJ.com called “IF U R KEWL U CAN TXT (Translation: If you are cool, you can text)” that talks about how texting is breaking into mainstream usage, well beyond the youth and early adopter crowd.

ZapTXT was included in the article as an example of how to monitor topics of interests on sites you read via IM, Email and SMS.

“ZAPtxt (www.zaptxt.com) will monitor Web sites based on keywords of your choice. You could choose to monitor a sports Web site for your team or a business site for a company; when new information appears about your keyword, you’re notified with a text message. As with a number of other services, you can also opt to receive alerts via e-mail or instant message.”

NJ.com provides news, business and sports updates from Newark Star-Ledger, The Times, Trenton, The Jersey Journal, Easton Express-Times, Bridgeton News and Today’s Sunbeam.

A big welcome to all the folks from NJ local communities that came by to check out ZapTXT. Our NJ debut was on Hoboken411, a blog focused on Hoboken, NJ where we are proud to power notifications for new posts and comments via IM, Email or Mobile Device.

Thanks for the mention Allan!

Cheers, Sameer

technorati tags:Nj.com, zaptxt, Hoboken411, Allan+Hoffman

Update: Fixed. All is well in Jabber land.

If you are using Jabber IM (which includes GTalk and Gizmo) as your notification method for ZapTasks, you might experience a delay. We’re working on this problem and we will resolve this issue as soon as possible. In the meantime, to ensure timely delivery, you can change your delivery method to email or to another IM client (Yahoo IM, MSN, AIM or Skype). We apologize for any inconvenience.

Mahalo, of Jason Calicanis fame, recently launched as a human-powered search engine. At first blush, its got a limited set of sources. I tested ‘Avocado Soup recipe’ (you know how us Northern Californians need to keep cool in this sweltering heat ;)), but no luck. The concept however has merit as a possible next incarnation of sites such as About.com. I think many will find the human powered, editorialized results, supplemented with Wikipedia results to be a refreshing compliment to Google, Ask, etc. The reviews have been positive and negative but one things is clear: this one will take a lot of time to gestate. Failing a bubble burst, the jury is going to be out for a looong time.

After spending some time on the site one thing is clear: If there were ever a discovery service that was begging for RSS this would be it. Why? Well, since they are going after quality and not just quantity, the rate (frequency) of updates is extremely slow, requiring me to return way too many times to see if theres something new on topics that I care about. I was hoping to set up a few ZapTasks and wait for alerts to come find me. Unfortunately no out bound RSS. They do use RSS very effectively to show related results on a search, but not as a subscription mechanism.

So team Mahalo, I’m sure RSS is on your roadmap, however here are some suggestions where RSS can help you make sure your audience sticks with you whilst you a) grow the content base, b) make your objective for this site a little clearer and 3) turn drive-by’s into trusting subscribers. Give me a feed for the following:

• If I do a search and you don’t have anything for me, let me subscribe to a feed that gives me a heads up when new topics that I’m interested are added.
• Search Results feed
• When a new entry thats related to my search term gets a Shaka, let me know. Since I can register, this should be folded into my profile
• When you deem a new item to be a related search or when the Top 7 change, ping me.

I’m sure theres more but this would keep me subscribed and therefore paying attention to your progress. Dave Winer is more forgiving on this topic but he sticks to this guns.
Happy Zapping, Sameer

technorati tags:Mahalo, RSS, RSS+Discovery, Feeds, ZapTXT, Jason+Calicanis

Duncan Riley at TechCrunch wrote earlier this morning about a Sunday Herald article that reports that Google is making deals with several UK media groups to show results on Google News.

Two take aways from the brewing commentary across some of the posts that I have read thus far:

• If deals are going to be struck between Google and media groups around search and discovery, other aggregations and syndicating services might be dead on arrival if content is made available only to specific aggregations.
• Does Google have the right to serve ads on its news page?

Assuming this news is true, this kicks off a possible shift in the current relationship between content producers and content distributors where the distributor pays the content publisher. Traditionally a manufacturer pays a distributor or lets a distributor take a commission or super impose value add services in exchange for pushing product. The web created a new mechanism where the distributor served up ads instead of charging the content producer. This helped a lot of smaller publishers get eyeballs without having to pay for distribution. With the rise of the blogosphere, and proliferation of high quality content from smaller or niche publishers and bloggers, no one is safe and just about everyone needs distributors to some degree to level the playing field on access to quality.

Lets be honest. If I were a publisher and Google came knocking/responded to my request to give me an exclusive or pay me for showing my content, its a pretty sweet deal given Google’s control of eyeballs. What’s baffling is that Google would offer any set of publishers such a deal, no matter how large the publisher. Consumers are going to loose confidence in the algorithm that’s supposed to automagically present the hottest stories from the best sources.

As to whether Google should show ads on their news agregation touch points, yes they should. They are providing a service to the consumer who is clearly ok with seeing an Ad in return for good search results or reliable news aggregation for that matter. Google, together with other aggregator service providers, enable publishers get to show case their content at all available consumer touch points. And they make money doing that.

Kevin Burton is spot on with regard to the issue of Ads. He says in the comments on the TechCrunch post: “You’re wrong that Google News would face problems if they ran ads. These publishers needs Google News more than they need them. Even if they DO run ads everyone wins. Google News only shows a small fraction of the article mandating a click through . A rising tide lifts all boats.”

So with this I’m hoping that this deal is centered around something like full article access or there’s some other integration of this content across the Google eyeball universe.

See also: discussions on Techmeme, and analysis on eWeek, and Publishing 2.0)

Cheers, Sameer

Update: Danny Sullivan at Search Engine Land reports that Google denies any such deal.

technorati tags:ZapTXT, Google, Publishing, Media, Advertising

Leon at Life Hack puts together a good list of sources to stay on top of your field by using RSS feeds. And to charge that up with a life hack, there’s some good suggestions on how to make Google Reader do some of the heavy lifting. Give it a read. Its a great start to figuring out how to get your head around the blogosphere when monitoring topics of importance to you. I would add PodZinger to this list of sources as well to cover podcasts and YouTube videos.

You could also use ZapTXT to group specific sources together and filter results for topics or keywords across these sources (for example: Monitor <client name> across your trusted blogs and news sites or Technorati’s authoritative sources + Digg, Del.icio.us etc.) so you only get what you care about. And as with all ZapTXT alerts, we’ll come find you via your choice of IM, Skype, Mobile Device or Email.

Cheers, Sameer

technorati tags:RSS, ZapTXT, googlereader, podzinger, research, filtering, productivity

This is pretty neat. You can now create your own podcast channel from RSS feeds that’s embeddable on your blog or anyone else’s for that matter and get an RSS feed for the channel as well. Dubbed the MyPodCastNetwork, pick your favorite podcasts from a directory that SplashCast maintains, add your own if you have some and that’s it - you’re on your way to becoming a famous producer of audio and video content. Your channel can be displayed on your own site, on someone else’s site, or be subscribed to, via RSS.

Consumers can add the feed for any show to their RSS readers or to ZapTXT. If you use ZapTXT, we’ll send you a notification via IM, Skype, Mobile Device or Email when new content is published  to channels that you subscribe to so you dont have to keep looking for updates.

iTunes works for this as well but if you want a rich consuming experience for certain types of audio and video content on your computer, laptop or Wii, the SplashCast media player makes a  lot of sense.  What I need to figure out tonight when I get home is how to move this content using my AirPort Express onto my home theater system, atleast for audio content. That would put SplashCast content on equal footing with other media that I consume via my receiver.

The blogosphere is lighting up with reviews on the release. 

technorati tags:ZapTXT, SplashCast, Podcast, AirPort+Express, RSS

The Library of Congress, or as Ken Varnum puts it “the granddaddy of
American Libraries” just started its very own blog. It’s great to see the LoC communicating via RSS.

The blog is written by Matt Raymond, Communications Director for the Library. I’ve been eagerly waiting to see what kinds of posts will show up on this blog given the gazillion topics that are good candidates for discussion on a daily basis. Nice to see a broad editorial strategy shaping up, covering not just news but interesting tit bits such as Exhibition Announcements, Today in History and general happenings in the world of reference librarians. I imagine the reach that Matt has in his position as Director of Coms for the LoC will bring us some very good, hard-to-find nuggets of information over time. Good luck with the blog.

Here’s the ZapTask for the LoC Blog if you want to monitor it for new posts.

Happy Zapping, Sameer

technorati tags:LoC, Library+of+Congress, Librarians, Library, ZapTXT, Matt+Raymond

We’re stoked to announce that TheStreet.com is using ZapTXT to enable its reader community to receive filtered notifications via Instant Messenger, SMS, Skype or Email. TheStreet.com users get all the current functionality that they would from ZapTXT.com - filter content, edit their feed sets, share ZapTasks and of course elect to receive alerts via any and all delivery mechanisms including the recently announced support for Skype.

For those of you not from the United States, TheStreet.com, founded in 1996, is a premium content provider on topics such as Investing, Stocks, Home Business, Mutual Funds, Real Estate & Personal Finance News and Analysis.

What’s particularly neat is that ZapTXT is wired to monitor content at the category level (Top Stories, Jim Cramer’s Mad Money Recap, Personal Finance, Video, Podcasts, etc.) as seen in the image below. A total of 58 new feeds and 20 paid content feeds are available

TheStreet.com users can now use ZapTXT to receive notifications when say a stock, fund, or any particular topic that they are interested in, hits the headlines on TheStreet.com. You pick one or more categories as seen above, filter by keywords or phrases and move on with your life. ZapTXT will notify you when we find a match.Here’s a quick example: Say the topic of Housing is top of mind for you these days.

• Go to the Street.coms RSS page
• Click on the ZapTXT button and you’ll see all of the categories light up with a ZapTXT button.
• Click on ZapTXT next any of the topics (e.g. Latest Headlines or Nicholas Yulicos who writes about real estate) and you’ll land on a set up page where you can filter headlines by keywords such as Housing, Homes, Tuscon, Townhouses etc.
• Select your delivery preferences (Email, IM, Skype or Mobile) and that’s it. You can create as many alerts as you want.

Or here are a few ZapTasks we set up to get you started. Click on any of these links and you’ll be on your way.
TheStreet.com Headlines: ZapTask
TheStreet.com Top Read: ZapTask
TheStreet.com 5 Dumbest Things on WallStreet: ZapTask
Jim Cramer’s Mad Money Recap: ZapTask
TheStreet.com Videos: ZapTask
All of Jim Cramer’s goodies rolled into one Task (Mad Money, Mailbag, Stop Trading, Cramer on Demand, Exec Interviews): ZapTask

We’ve been seeing a lot of users monitoring financial sites and blogs recently from ZapTXT.com and TheStreet.com is a great addition that we are thrilled and proud to be working with. As our newest publisher, it’s been great to work with them and we look forward to more goodies as we roll out new capabilities over the coming months.

TheStreet.com’s feeds are powered by the wonderful FeedBurner. Here’s FeedBurners announcement and the press release.

Happy Zapping or maybe Booyah! is more appropriate this time
Cheers, Sameer

We just released Skype support for ZapTXT! You can now receive your ZapTXT IM alerts in your Skype chat window just as you do with our other IM client delivery mechanisms. This was a new approach to implementing IM clients for ZapTXT as another step towards supporting our new feed monitoring architecture. Not to mention, ZapTXT alerts just look very neat in a Skype chat window. All credit to the Skype client for this, of course.

Here’s what you need to get started:

Existing ZapTXT users:

• log-in to ZapTXT and go Settings
• change your IM settings by entering your Skype username
• Select Skype from the dropdown menu of IM clients
• Remember to add ZapTXT as a contact on your Skype contact list. And you’re done!

New ZapTXT users:

• Go to ZapTXT and set up an alert (don’t worry, we’ll walk you through the process)
• On the set up page you can select from any one of the IM client options
• Enter your Skype ID and Select Skype from the dropdown menu of IM clients
• Remember to add ZapTXT as a contact in your Skype contact list.

Heres what your alerts will look like:

Any questions, write to us in the comments below.

Happy Zapping, Sameer

P.S. Kudos to Paul, Eduard and Xavier for making this happen.