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

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

Technorati has been blocking ZapTXT from accessing its RSS feeds on search results pages for a few weeks.

Some of you have written to us and we are very very sorry for the late response - we have been trying to engage them to get this resolved. No luck other than a promise to look into it about a month ago. 

We’ll keep providing a status update as soon as they respond to this. We’ve gone up and down the management chain but there’s been radio silence for a while. ‘Traditional’ feed readers seem to be working fine for this so its a little baffling.

Until this gets resolved, please use one of the other blog search engines if you are trying to monitor the blogsphere for a given topic.

Sorry for the inconvenience.

Marshall Kirkpatrick moved on from Techcrunch over the weekend.

From the early days when ZapTXT was a raw application, albeit with a lot of promise, we have been proud to have him as a patron. Boasting that Marshall relies on ZapTXT for his information monitoring so he is “first to post” would have been great PR for us but divulging that information would have been inappropriate, of course. This was made public today on Marshall’s Blog so Marshall, our sincere thanks for your patronage and for remembering ZapTXT in the context of your writings on TechCrunch.

On behalf of our little team here at ZapTXT, best wishes to you for your next gig.

Looking forward to my “Marshall Watch” ZapTask spurting out alerts once again.

p.s. Here’s a ZapTask for Marshall’s Blog if anyone wants to receive alerts when a new post shows up.

We just formally announced ourselves to the world and released a new set of features.

Here’s a run-down of whats new in this release:

1. Publisher widgets: If you publish content that is RSS-enabled, please check this out. You’ll see how we can help you drive traffic, inform your editorial strategy and generate better ad revenue.

Here’s where you can find the the what’s, why’s and how’s.

2. Receive your alerts as a custom RSS feeds: If you like ZapTXT’s monitoring features but prefer using a traditional RSS reader to receive ZapTXT alerts, you can now do that.

In addition to traditional RSS Readers, if you live within a start page such as Netvibes, here’s what it would look like. All your information still on your start page. Cool?

3. Share your ZapTasks: You can now share a ZapTask that you created with friends and colleagues. So if you labored over building an air tight list of feeds to monitor say a competitor, a gadget, a drug, simply hit share and fire it off to someone. Of course you could also export as an OPML file if you like.

4: Top Searches: Don’t know what feeds to use for a ZapTask you would like to create? We now let you see feeds in the ZapTXT ecosystem, by search term. Some of you found that leveraging the collective intelligence in this way to be a useful approach. So here you go!

Eduard, Xavier, Jane get all the credit for making this happen on the development and production side. Finally, here’s the announcement that went out. For that, a big thanks to Tim for all his hard work and diligence.

Questions? We have answers.

Fire away in the comments section below or drop us a line at support [at] zaptxt-inc.com.

We’re thrilled to open up ZapTXT support for LJ Talk.
LiveJournal represents a solid illustration of how Social Networks can actually drive usage by leveraging open technologies. Unlike some of the closed networks, LJ users can now use LJ talk to participate in a community, chat with friends outside their LJ experience, as well as access other services such as ZapTXT that they otherwise had to use via an additional IM client. That leads to more LJ usage as opposed to what many closed networks m ight think.
For those of you that are existing ZapTXT users and plan to use LJ Talk as your Instant Messenger Client, follow these 2 steps:

1. Log into ZapTXT and under settings, select LJ Talk as your IM client as seen in the screen shot below

2. Once you’ve updated your settings, simply add ZapTXT as a friend in LiveJournal and ZapTXT will show up in your buddy list.
Now, all your ZapTXT Alerts that you elect to receive via IM will show up within LJ.
Here’s a sample….
I have a ZapTask for Mashable. Here’s what my alert looked like on LJ Talk:

If you are new to ZapTXT, simply go to zaptxt.com and click on ‘Start Here’. We’ll walk you through the process and you’ll be up and running in no time. If you have any questions, drop us a line at support [at] zaptxt-inc [dot] com.

Here’s the link to more information on LJ Talk from Live Journal: http://news.livejournal.com/, and a review by Pete Cashmore on Mashable
Happy Zapping,

Sameer

ZapTXT forums went live last week. We hope to use the forums to collect feedback, comments and ignite a discussion on how ZapTXT can support specific user communities with their ‘need to know now’ as well as general content filtering needs.

In addition to Craigslist and eBay users, our tag cloud has begun to flourish with very useful feeds around topics such as diabetes, gadgets and PR. It’s nice to see how people are using ZapTXT to receive alerts about important information that they would otherwise have to monitor manually.

Two companies feed sets have also emerged for Sun and Cisco. For example the Sun tag ropes in a sort of 360 on the company’s publicly available content sources - press releases, events, Jonathans blog as well as other important information such as system and patch updates. Nice to see early on.

We hope that the forums compliments these and new user communities to drive not only sharing on useful feeds but also on how we can continue to improve how ZapTXT serves your specific filtering needs.

We look forward to engaging with you at the Forums site.

Happy Zapping, Sameer

Its been a week since we launched and now that we’ve caught up with some sleep and re-introduced ourselves to our families, I thought I’d take a minute to say a big Thank You to all that reviewed and posted about ZapTXT.

We also got many many private emails wishing us the best and kudos (and bug catches as well!) which we are very grateful for.

Here’s the run down of some of the posts in the first week:

Richard MacManus of Read/Write Web had some kind words to say about the new release here: ZapTXT: promising RSS topic subscription service 

Richard’s post (thank you Richard) triggered an eventual showing on the front page of Techmeme as well.

Emily Chang of eHub was nice enough to post as well: ZapTXT re-launches

Amit Agarwal of Digital Inspiration was the first to post a nice review. If this title summarizes his opinion of ZapTXT, we better start coding much faster to live up to such tall praise. Here’s the post: ZapTXT: Monitor your Favorite RSS Feeds for Keywords [Better than Google Blog Alerts]

Ewan MacLeod of SMSTextNews shot us back an email right away with hearty congratulations and alerted his users to our new release. Post: Have you checked ZapTXT.com recently?

Rev2.org summarizes its analysis with “ZapTXT turns out to be one of the best players in this space”. Full Post: Track and Monitor Feeds with ZapTXT 

And the blog posts keep coming in…

Please write to us at:     feedback (at) zaptxt-inc.com,     if you have any comments or suggestions. 

Thanks again to every one for their good wishes. Look for new ‘mini’ releases starting in a week.