A lot of folks have discovered the wonders of going over their monthly SMS allotments because of the alert systems built into popular Web apps like Twitter. But what about getting SMS alerts for other sites, too? A service called Pingie is doing just that, letting you plug in whatever RSS feeds you'd like to keep an eye on (like ours), and sending you a portion of the latest post as an SMS message. The service notes its usefulness for sites like Slickdeals and Woot (two of my personal favorites) as well as news sites for getting the most up-to-date info when away from your machine.
What makes the system nice is its feed-management screen where you can see what feeds you're subscribing to, and add or remove others freely. You can also preview the feed once you've added it, which is a nice way to gauge if you're about to get RSS fatigue, or worse: a massive, overage-inducing SMS onslaught.
There are a handful of other services that do this including Yahoo's Alerts, ZapTXT, RSSFWD, and Web-Alerts.com. It's also worth noting that Pingie is U.S.-only, and Sprint and Nextel customers may have trouble getting messages from Pingie delivered, although according to the devblog, a fix is in the works.
[via Lifehacker]
