Anyways, does anyone have an alternative service they can suggest?
Intigi gives you the power of Lucene indexed search on the newest articles on the web. You can subscribe to Intigi curated sources, or add your own RSS feeds or Twitter home timeline, and then filter results using powerful Lucene queries (fields, boosting, phrases, slop, wildcards, stop words) and other filters (social signals, word count, publishing date, presence of image or video). Intigi delivers results once per day or once per week via email, or you can view results in realtime through the web interface.
Disclaimers: I'm one of the co-founders and it's a for-pay product.
I think your product looks really cool, but doing a 30 day trial on a product like this doesn't make sense to me. I may not even be able to validate the products usefulness in 30 days.
What I would suggest is that, as a marketing professional, I have a TON of topics I'd like to monitor. Why not let me monitor 1 topic forever and then force me to pay if I want more?
I guess I'm more interested in why this isn't a freemium product. What was the thought process?
The reason we haven't pulled the trigger on this to date is twofold. First, we're a bootstrapped startup and we've been cautious about our burn rate (e.g., scaling infrastructure before we've achieved product/market fit and a sustainable revenue model). Second, for some time our product wasn't fully self-service. We were concerned about the support issues that would come with a significant growth in our user base, especially free users, potentially outside our target market.
We've now progressed beyond these two issues, and will launch a freemium model soon, with 1 or 2 interests and cached results that are updated once or twice per day.
I'd appreciate any other feedback, and happy to answer questions by email at mjfern@intigi.com.
I'll share some details of how we weathered the support issues :).
You can also do RSS aggregation, as each "channel" can consume as many RSS feeds as you want, and then the aggregate of all the entries is itself exposed as an RSS feed.
There's also voting, tagging, a "share" feature that lets you send links via email or XMPP, etc. It also looks a lot like Reddit for some weird reason.... whistles innocently
(There's a new visual theme coming that won't look so obviously inspired by Reddit, BTW)
All of that said, we're not at a 1.0 release yet and while a LOT of stuff works, and someone could almost certainly get value from it, there are definitely bugs and things that don't yet work the way we want them to. In particular the recommendations engine is currently just the Lucene MoreLikeThis filter which is pretty naive. We have plans to roll some much more sophisticated analysis using Mahout[2] eventually, but haven't gotten there yet.
Eventually we'll have persistent searches with alerts via email and XMPP, alerts based on vote thresholds, and a whole raft of other features. It's coming together, just more slowly than we'd like.
If you want to take a look, there's a public demo server at
http://demo.fogbeam.org:8080/neddick1
Sample logins are testuser0-testuser19 with password "secret".
The front-page right now is actually being fed the RSS feed from here at HN, but you'll notice it's a few days out of date. That's one of the bugs I mentioned. There's a bad piece of content coming in on one of the feeds, and it's breaking the parsing, which is currently causing it to break out of the loop that consumes the feed. Fixing that is on my TODO list for Real Soon Now, so hopefully by this weekend.
Edit: This channel is more up to date, and it is, indeed, being populated from a Google Alert. This is getting a bit meta circular now... :-)
http://demo.fogbeam.org:8080/neddick1/r/Microsoft
If you wanted to use this for a more general "entire web" alerting tool, you'd have to build (or acquire) a crawler to go out and get the data. I think there might be some useful stuff in Nutch[3], Droids[4], Manifold[5] and/or Heritrix[6], but I won't swear to it.
That's the bit we're not really interested in, as we aren't trying to build a public, consumer facing app here, but a tool for use inside organizations. Still, if somebody wanted to use it that way, it could be done. Scalability would also be an issue, but I think that could be managed..
[1]: https://github.com/fogbeam/Neddick
[4]: http://incubator.apache.org/droids/
Basic account is free. I've only been using it for a couple of days, so I can't really comment on how well it works yet.
It's near the bottom of the right sidebar.