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.

One of our users suggested a ‘why didn’t we think of it’ feature that makes editing tasks even more usable. We liked it so much that we dropped everything and implemented it right away.

Now, when you edit a ZapTask now to refine your feed set for improved notifications, you see a live URL to each feed that you are monitoring to check whether the feed is still valid and something that you like. Many of our users monitoring tasks have 5,10,15 feeds that they monitor for the latest news on a gadget they are looking to buy, or a Web 2 topic they are monitoring across Read/Write Web, TechCrunch, GigaOM. However many users also monitor obscure or niche sites that may or may not still have a valid RSS feed.

With live URLs you can always check the link to see if its still live and actually generating results for you.

Thanks for the feedback. Keep it coming.

eduard