Notify.me lets you add any RSS feed to your source list, add filters to your feeds, select from the now four destination options (SMS, IM, email, app), and notifies you as soon as the feed is updated. The new desktop application, quietly released to users last night, is an Adobe AIR based app that is sparse on the feature set—notifications only—but a convenient, less cluttered alternative to the other destination options available.
Jason Wieland, Notify.me's CEO, says, "We are soft launching it for about a week because it is pre-release with an almost certainty of some bugs...we concentrated this release on stability. We are following the mantra, "release early, release often" and the plan is to make an iteration on the app every week or two."
Wieland also claims that Notify.me is the fastest online notification service available, delivering alerts within 30 seconds of newly published content. Notify.me currently has 4,500 active members, with the average user receiving about 14 notifications a day. Wieland estimates that the site sends out a total of more than 50,000 notifications per day.
To download the app, you can go here, or navigate to the "Account" tab, select "destinations," and locate the app box on the page. Remember to return to your sources list and select "app" for each source that you want to receive on the new app.
Also, Wieland let us know that users using Mac OSX Spaces can receive ninja mode notifications on all spaces; information on how to set it up is available on their wiki.
I've been using Notify.me since I initially covered the site and I've enjoyed the speed of notifications (which I can confirm are very fast), and the ability to use it as a Twitter track hack. There have been some reports of unreliability and bugs, but the Notify.me team seems to be actively using Get Satisfaction to identify and address the issues.