Diffbot : webpage monitoring in a reader
3spots has the latest in webpage monitoring with a service called Diffbot, it is an RSS Reader with a built in webpage monitor…the great thing it seems is that you can read your monitored webpages in RSS Reader tradition.
I mostly use WatchThatPage, and I get updates by email, I guess there is no stopping me converting this email into RSS to read it in my RSS Reader. Or I can read the latest by logging in to WatchThatPage, but this isn’t a great experience. This is where Diffbot takes off, they have just made the reading experience more with what you are used to.
Although if you use Feedwhip, you need not bother, as this monitoring service enables you to login to read, sends email alerts, or even generates a feed for each of your alerts to subscribe to…pity the login interface isn’t set up to look like an RSS Reader. But you can subscribe to these feeds in your usual RSS Reader…just make a folder for your webpage monitoring feeds.
I guess the good thing about Diffbot is that your webpage monitor and your RSS Reader are the same client…this is handy, but l can never find an all in one web 2.0 swiss army PIM tool that I’ll be happy with.
NOTE: Feedwhip is based in a social network environment, where you can look at a users monitored items, or browse these items by tag.
Sorry about that I got carried away, the only communal part about it, is that you can view the most recent feed whips. Actually some updates are you can group your feeds into a single feed, and you can have multiple email addresses per account.
Also see Newzie, it is a desktop RSS Reader with a webpage monitoing module…Elsua has a thorough post on this and other great features, this is an advanced RSS Reader.
![email.png](http://services.nexodyne.com/email/icon/GxbiQvgbwBgCnw%3D%3D/oIp%2BJMQ%3D/R01haWw%3D/0/image.png"){kind=icon}
Hi, I’m the guy behind Feedwhip.
I want to clarify a little bit about your last statement (”Feedwhip is based in a social network environment…”), specifically as it relates to privacy concerns:
First of all, we don’t currently support tags on feeds, so browsing by tag isn’t possible. But it is on the list of things to add.
Secondly, any subscription can be made private so that nobody knows that it is being monitored.
Thirdly, there’s no way to trace a subscription back to a given user. You can see that somebody is monitoring a given URL, but there’s no way to know who is doing it.
Thanks for the review. Creating a more RSS-reader-like UI is a great idea, and something I’ll add to the ever-expanding list of things to do.
Regards,
Steve Leroux
Comment by Steve Leroux — August 31, 2006 @ 4:53 am