Is there a free service that sends news and weather alerts via AIM?
July 8, 2004 12:15 PM   Subscribe

Is there a free service that will send me IM's via AIM when there's breaking news? ABC does mail alerts but they aren't "breaking" by the time I read them. How about weather alerts too?
posted by smackfu to Computers & Internet (10 answers total)
 
I look for such things, and I haven't seen one yet.

It's my understanding that AOL isn't fond of such programmatic interface to their system,and goes out of their way to discourage it.

I get CNN's breaking news emails to my cellphone, and their lists are pretty big; I get it in my mailbox about 3 minutes before my phone gets it, but they both often beat on-air.
posted by baylink at 12:38 PM on July 8, 2004


Wunderground.com offers weather alerts by e-mail for $5 per year. I've never tried this, but it is an otherwise fantastic weather site, so I'd guess their email gizmo works wonders, too.
posted by grateful at 1:56 PM on July 8, 2004


Okay, okay, so it's not free, but it's almost free.
posted by grateful at 2:00 PM on July 8, 2004


I work for MSNBC.com, and we offer alerts, but as you may guess, they're not for AIM, but for MSN Messenger.
posted by GaelFC at 2:00 PM on July 8, 2004


Best answer: I work for BBC News, and we've got a service too - but you need to install our program to use the alerts. It gets updated at the same time as the site, though, and the program is reliable and small.
posted by ascullion at 2:12 PM on July 8, 2004


Response by poster: grateful, I have found EmergencyEmail which does weather alerts by email for free. But no AIM.
posted by smackfu at 2:46 PM on July 8, 2004


Response by poster: Oooo, that's cool ascullion. I wasn't even forced to give up all my demographic information or get an account to install it. How revolutionary.
posted by smackfu at 3:03 PM on July 8, 2004


Glad you like it.
posted by ascullion at 12:32 AM on July 9, 2004


Have you tried Yahoo Alerts? I'm not terribly familiar with AIM, but Yahoo can send alerts to email and mobile devices. All you need to set it up is a Yahoo email account, which is free.

To show how technogeeky I am, I currently have a Timex Internet Messenger watch set up to receive news updates from Yahoo.
posted by SteveInMaine at 8:04 AM on July 9, 2004


Response by poster: Some investigation reveals that the beta of the new Yahoo Alerts (not the current one) can do AP or Reuters Breaking News alerts to Yahoo Messenger. So good tip if you use Yahoo.
posted by smackfu at 4:33 PM on July 9, 2004


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