As they were pulling the plug on Reader I was saying to myself, "at least I still have Alerts..." Silly me...
http://venturebeat.com/2013/03/21/google-alerts-broken-useless-and-slowed-to-a-trickle/
http://searchengineland.com/google-alerts-still-broken-152444
My first quest has been to look for alternatives. I'd be interested to know what you guys use as my online searches have not come up with much that looks usable or affordable.
Oh no! I depend on these utterly for "industry news" social media fodder.
I'm wondering if you could spin something up with IFTTT using Twitter, Buzzfeed, etc
https://ifttt.com/recipes/51529
https://ifttt.com/recipes/19576
It's been crap for a while, but good still miss it massively. It seems that alternatives are thin on the ground too .
Ahrefs put out an announcement this week about a new "mentions" tracker. That might take up some of the slack.
Has anybody tried Trackur? Haven't looked into it myself but they now say they can be used an an alternative to Google alerts
Trackur is Andy Beal's ORM tool (Online Reputation Management).
It's pretty good, not sure that it would be a replacement for Google Reader, although to be fair I've never liked reader so pleased to see it go, they never did a jot of development work with it.
The plus side to this is that the 2005 RSS technology might lead someone (Digg possibly) to come from the pack and make a much better RSS reader that we can all adopt.
I use Reeder for the Mac/iPad etc. and they say they are working on a solution, they have some time still.
Trackur is good, I give it a big thumbs up.
Replacement for alerts, not reader
Head - Slap
I'm so used to getting this sort of information for free that it's quite a shock to look at the pricing of these alternative services. Ahrefs and Trackur are not cheap.
So, I'm guessing that we'll all just be scraping google results for this then?
no, I'll be beta testing your new scraping tool :)
Quote from: Gurtie on March 26, 2013, 04:18:51 PM
no, I'll be beta testing your new scraping tool :)
Well, that is what I am thinking. However I've got 3 tools in production - I really need to get one finished before starting another.
Quoteone finished before starting another
But that would be so boring ;D
- http://philbradley.typepad.com/phil_bradleys_weblog/2013/03/mention-a-possible-replacement-for-google-alerts.html
- http://www.jeremyfloyd.com/2013/03/google-alerts-alternatives/