KnowHow's eLerts

Filed in archive E-Commerce on October 5, 2005

The Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco is happening right now and it is at full capacity. At the conference a company named KnowHow is showing off their new consumer RSS solution called the eLerts service. The company explains their new product as follows:

What is KnowNow eLerts?It's a free Internet Explorer browser toolbar that provides real-time notification of new content posted to web. You select the publishers or sites to watch and then alerts will float up describing what's new as soon as it is posted by the publisher. You can click the link to read the full post, pin to your desktop as a reminder, or simply ignore it and let it fade away. A list of recent alerts is also provided on your toolbar in case you want to read it later.

How does it work?
A background service hosted by KnowNow starts monitoring your selected channels. As soon as new information is added to these channels an alert is displayed on your toolbar. It works for blogs, news feeds, and advanced versions can even track channels of activity inside your business.

The toolbar service works with any RSS and atom feed and an RSS reader is not required. You are simply alerted about new information as it is available, provided with a link directly back to the posted content, and you choose to view it on demand.I've downloaded eLerts and tried it out. The installation is very simple and the dragging and dropping of RSS links directly from a web page and into the toolbar is pretty cool. Once an RSS feed you have subscribed to is updated a transparent alert will briefly display on your desktop or the toolbar allows a user to navigate to the new content at anytime. I like this new tool and think people should check it out.