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notice that you have three alert options: you can get your alerts by e-mail,
by Yahoo Messenger (an Instant Messaging service), and by phone. (See the
“Add a mobile device” link on the Alerts page if you don't have the option
to get phone alerts.)
he nice thing about alerts for your phone is that they're specially format-
ted for a phone's small screen and don't have a lot of active content (movies,
lashing banner ads, complicated Web page scripts, and so forth) that your
phone can't handle. For the most part, you'll ind for the most part that
these alerts are brief and easy to read. Be sure to check out the alerts for
news and RSS feeds.
Yahoo Alerts has the largest search engine collection of phone alerts useful
to information trappers, but as I said already, it's certainly not the only one
available. A lot of the mobile alert services out there are for entertainment,
but some of them can keep you up to date on some interesting information.
Let's take a look at two.
FeedBeep
here are other ways to read RSS feeds on newer phones (and we look at
them a little later in the chapter), but if you've got an old-school, few-fea-
tures phone, you'll appreciate this service. FeedBeep (feedbeep.com) lets
you send keyword-iltered RSS feeds to your mobile phone, which is handy
if you want to keep up with certain kinds of news or other things that are
delivered by RSS feeds (tags, classiied ads, and so on).
However, Feedbeep is not a free service—it costs either $2.95 or $14.95 a month,
depending on how many alerts you wish to get. You could use these for your
important feeds that you can ilter a little by keyword. (Otherwise, you might
ind yourself getting a lot of SMS alerts, and spending a lot of money.)
Weatherbug Mobile
You might not think that weather is worth much of a discussion, but ater
hurricanes, loods, snow, and a variety of other emergency-level meteo-
rology, it's nice to have the latest forecasts coming straight to your phone.
Weatherbug (weatherbug.com/mobile/default.asp) is free.
Note that the services I've mentioned aren't nearly all the mobile alert ser-
vices that are out there—so many of them are oriented to a particular site
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