Yotify Can’t Really Notify - Yet

By Zoli Erdos on September 24, 2008

I am an avid Google Alerts user, who is greatly underwhelmed but the lack of
setup choices, the inflexibility of delivery options, search combinations, and
mostly the erratic (occasional?) delivery.

So when TechCrunch calls a new service “Google
Alerts on Steroids”, I do pay attention, and check it out (I guess that
makes me part of the 53,651, or 1M by
now.)

Unfortunately my enthusiasm about Yotify, a new personal web-scout
did not last long. I gave up just as soon as I started setting up my alerts – or
Scouts in Yoti-speak. Here’s why:

Do you see what I see? You have to select sources one by one. No
Ctrl-click… no way to pick all the sources I would use the same search argument
one. That’s it’, I’m outta here. Seriously, Yotify
aims to be a timesaver, but this omission alone would condemn me to spend half a
day on setup. Who has time for this?

Btw, the list of default sources is quite short, but that’s expected from a
beta service. It’s nice that you can add your own source URL or Feed as a
Shortcut, but why not let me upload an entire OPML file? Despite a
nice UI, I have the same fundamental problem that I’ve found with Google Alerts:
it’s a fragmented world of single searches, there’s no way to combine them or
execute the same search against a list of sources.

On the upside, Yotify offers a lot of nice features, e.g. it allows to track
price changes, auctions, events, your social network, LinkedIn profile
changes…etc. It could help with shopping, travel, recruiting – obviously it is
an ambitious tool, worth keeping an eye on – but until I can easily set it up
without major time investment, it’s a no-go for me.