Alertpedia: The Wikipedia of Alerts

We started Alretpedia in 2005 with a single category of alerts: Earthquakes. We were tracking 4 websites to get the earthquake data.

Today, the list has grown to include a few Dozens more - from Social to News to Shopping, and it's growing every day. And we track over 10000 sites every day to send out alerts. The nice thing is, you get all these alerts in a Single Email per day, and you pay NOTHING for it!

Here's the list of alert categories as of today.

NEWS	SHOPPING & DEALS
Cricket, follow players, teams and tournamentset Amber Alerts Weather Alerts for your Area Headline News Alerts Health and Medical News Horoscope Recalls Earthquakes	Flipkart Price Tracking Craigslist House listings and real estate Amazon Airfares Deals, Coupons, Daily Free Stuff
SOCIAL NETWORKS & BLOGS	FUN STUFF
Twitter Pinterest Facebook Tumblr Blogger / Blogspot Wordpress	Bollywood Movie News and Reviews Local Events Hollywood New Movies and Reviews Youtube Flickr photo alerts DVD releases
LEARN & EARN	WHAT INDIA LOVES
Jobs of your choice in your area Khan Academy, New courses	Cricket Flipkart Bollywood

And dozens more to come :)

Thanks, Team AP

Monitoring Social Media: Alerts on Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, Pinterest

Much of the interesting information these days is on Social Networks.. but let's face it, it gets too much to follow it all. At the same time, we don't want to miss the important updates - stuff that matters to us.

• Do I want to know when my Facebook friend gets a new dog? Yes! When they mention my name? Absolutely! When they get a haircut? Probably not; may be on Pinterest, but not on Facebook :) [Facebook Alerts, Track friend and fan pages]
• Do I want to read every tweet from Obama? Not sure. When he tweets about Romney's 47%? Absolutely!  [Twitter Alerts]
• Do you want to see every little Pin on Pinterest? The universe doesn't have enough time for it. Do you want to know when they post how to make Butter Beer? Yes!  [Pinterest Alerts]
• Do you worry about missing fascinating questions on PHP or the gossip on Facebook, in Quora?  [Quora Alerts]
• And, finally, don't you want to know when someone talks about you, or your business, on these sites?

Alertpedia now provides customized social networking alerts, so you can let Alertpedia track social media and tell you when stuff happens; and leave you alone otherwise :)

Team AP
Being Socially Alert ;)

50000 things people track on the web

Do you know what people like to get alerted about? If you guessed Earthquakes in Bay Area and Allergies on the East Coast, you're in for a surprise.
And, where do most people care to track the web? Silicon Valley? Nope. It's Auburn! OK, one should not derive drastic conclusions from a mere 50K random data points, but let's drop our statistician hats a bit and have some data fun, shall we?

I'm sharing some insights from a sample of 50000 alerts people have set up on Alertpedia.com. Alertpedia has been providing free email alerts since 2005 on stuff ranging from Craigslist & Amazon to Jobs & Houses to Earthquakes & Local Concerts. The idea is simple: you specify what you want to be alerted about (e.g., "email me when a Bike goes on sale in Madison, WI on Craigslist; or a when big quake happens in California") and forget about it. Alertpedia tracks 1000s of websites on your behalf and only emails you when that stuff happens.

So here are some quick graphics on the kind of stuff people like to track on the web.

What Categories do people set up alerts on?

The winner is - Local-Forsale, which is essentially stuff posted on Craigslist for sale. The world loves to track Craigslist! Some of the categories like Amazon alerts are very new, so I expect them to pick up steam over time.

What key words do people track the most across the categories?

 Gimme Free! Website jobs anyone? Honda and Toyoto still rule the roads! And Obama beats Sharepoint!

And where? 

Surprise, Auburn, Alabama rules! Looking at the time series of alerts from there, I realized a nice viral effect - one person sets up a few alerts, then a few join the next day, and so on. Are people more social in Auburn?

So what does a data scientist want?

There's no end to what a data miner can dig out of this data.. Drill down the data on time, location, category, filter, etc.. and correlate it with what's happening in the world at that time (Quake in Japan, and the number of Quake alerts go up). This is great stuff! Of course Google Search and Alerts have a billion times more data, but not this sort of categorized and semantically rich alerts!

Gotta love data! Thank you Alertpedia and all the users for using it.

Want to experience the future web? Set up some custom alerts on Alertpedia:, let it track the web for you, so you can have more time for the "real world"! :)

thanks, vishy

Vishy Poosala

innovate & impact

Just in time for T20: Cricket Alerts!

Do you want to know when Sachin makes a statement on not-retiring? 

Or, when England figures out how to play spinners?

Do you stay up at midnight worried that you might miss the latest Cricket news on cricinfo.com? ;-) Ok, that's a bit too much, but do you feel that you could spend time better on the ground hitting the ball than scanning websites for cricket news?

Now you can get custom cricket news alerts on players & matches right in your mailbox
http://alertpedia.com/cricket.php

You can follow news on a player (Sachin Tendulkar, any one?), Team (Hello Sri Lanka!), or Tournaments (T20 mania), or just about any highlights from the world of Cricket.

And, you will get EXACTLY ONE EMAIL per day with all your alerts together. So, good bye time-wasting on the web, hello Cricket!

Game On!
Team AP