A new web service that started in September takes an interesting approach towards the information overload problem on the web. Yotify takes an approach that covers the ground between search engines and social networks. While search engines provide us with results from all the web and social networks are people and activity centric, Yotify provides a service that lets the user maintain a watch or scout on select sites and be alerted when events occur that meet certain criteria.
This criteria could be the price of an item on Craiglist falling within the limit you are willing to pay or video of a particular video-game showing up on Youtube. You can also create scouts that will post your queries on to facebook or frienfeed, making use of your social network as well.
An excerpt from Ars Technica
Not enthusiastic about the progress of semantic search experiments and feeling confined by simplistic RSS feeds, Bouganim and his six-person team set out to create a “let me know when” platform that could do the heavy lifting for queries like, “Tell me when a video of this game I just saw an ad for shows up on YouTube.”
Yotify isn’t quite that intelligent yet, but if the service sees decent adoption from users and site owners, it could smarten up quite a bit.
Yotify provides a adds a lot more customizability than a simple Alerts tool. Also, the development team behind Yotify plans to provide a browser plug-in and also tools for website owners to directly make available updates.
The concept behind yotify is to benefit from the fact that for every kind of media, there are certain sites that are the primary sources of information and instead of having to scout the websites ourselves, why not automate that process. Do send in your comments on what you feel about Yotify.
