IngBoo mashes up RSS alerts with feed reading

IngBoo is a new service that aggregates RSS feeds and can track topics and keywords across multiple content sites. The service was pitched to me as a tracking tool, but it also serves double duty as a headline reader the likes of Netvibes and My Yahoo. It analyzes each feed to find out how fresh the information is, and will show you with a simple pie graph how often the latest stories came in. You can also preview some of the most recent headlines and click straight to them.

To create alerts you have to use its built-in search tool, which will pick which of its trackers best fits your query. You pick which ones you want, then set the priority for each which affects in what order and how often the service goes through its searches. You can then pick how you want alerts delivered, which includes e-mail, IM, and SMS messages.

Where the service earns its stripes is letting you choose what time of day you want to be alerted when there are new items, which ranges anywhere from real time to just mornings, afternoons, and evenings. You're also able to set aside certain times when you don't want to be disturbed like on nights and weekends, which will control all of your alerts universally. There really aren't enough services that do this, and it's really nice--especially if you've got it set up to deliver SMS alerts.

While simple to use, I prefer Trackle and Alerts.com, both of which offer much more control over sources and per-alert settings, so you can set certain ones to send you real-time alerts, while others are simply provided as a weekly summary. If IngBoo were to add this, it would definitely be more valuable as a tool since you don't always want to get constant alerts for less important topics.