Damn. Just tested it on a site that I lost interest in [1] because a feed isnt offered. The service doesnt work for the particular site because there is an RSS feed, but it contains the wrong content. :(
I use the Firefox extension Update Scanner to much the same effect: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/3362. No complaints so far, although my use has been mild. Note that you'll need to install via the beta channel if you've got Firefox 3.6.
If this gains wide usage, it could be a boon to RSS adoption. Users could eventually learn to think of websites as collections of changing content, so they'll have less difficulty accepting the use case that RSS offers.
Some people might even think RSS is introduced as an enhancement to this Google feature.
(Or maybe this implementation will become so solid that RSS becomes unnecessary, but I doubt it.)
Understood, but I can imagine a website displaying a button for "Get notified when we add new information" or something to that effect. Personally, I'd love to see more these buttons on local government websites, which are notorious for not having RSS feeds. So people might begin to use Google Reader upon discovering this new feature.
This takes me back... Internet Explorer 5 for Mac used to support a widely lauded feature similar to this, where you could "subscribe" to a page and it would tell you when it updated.
RSS pretty much obsoleted the feature and I have never seen it in a browser since. There have definitely been times when it would be useful, and I'm glad it's in Google Reader now!
Cool stuff. I have been using Sucuri's Network Integrity monitor for the same thing... I monitor my own sites and some pages that I am interested to be notified when they change.
That can be very useful as an intrusion detection system if your pages are modified without you knowing it.
Because they're not directly making money off of me.
I used to comment on movies on IMDB until they took the information I and others submitted to their free website and went commercial, putting tons of ads up and clearly started making money off of my contributions.
I also refuse to give reviews to Amazon for similar reasons.
I'm ok with participating in non-commercial forums, as I feel they are less likely to sell information about me than sites which have gone commercial.
Also, I don't really view forums as tools for collecting information about their participants, unlike all the "free" web-services run by corporations. I suppose forums could be used for this purpose, but I think at this point it's just less likely. But it's definitely something to consider.
> I also refuse to give reviews to Amazon for similar reasons.
I could not picture myself bothered by Amazon reviews. They help decide when to and when to not buy. They also help me decide between two books on the same subject, gives me tips on another titles/authors that I didn't know, etc.
Amazon.com delivers product suggestions by profiling you. Google provides better search results by profiling your search history. How can this be a bad thing for you?
If I could trust them to do that and only that with the information they collect about me, maybe I wouldn't mind so much.
But, first, what they do with the information they collect about me is completely out of my control. They could sell it to someone else or to another corporation or to the/a government for all I know. And I won't even know, as they're not required to tell me about what they actually do with the information they collect about me. And even if the only thing they do now with my information is provide suggestions and improve search results for me and don't sell any of this information to others, that doesn't mean that they won't change their minds and start doing something else at a later date.
Second, and more importantly, I have a profound distrust of corporations. Knowledge is power and I don't want to allow corporations to get even more power over me (or over anyone else).
Third, I believe any information about me is information I own, and if these companies want to collect information about me or use it in any way, they should ask my permission.
If I feel that it would be a good thing for them to either collect information about me or use it to "improve search results" or make recommendations or do whatever else they propose to do with that information, then I'll give them that permission. If not, they should be forbidden by law from doing so.
But, since there are no such laws (at least not in the US, that I'm aware of) I'll just forego using their service completely. In fact, even if there were laws, I'm not sure if I'd use their service, since it would take a lot of convincing for me to believe these corporations were actually obeying the law.
The fact that it runs on Google's servers doesn't make it any less valuable to me. It does give Google some valuable data, but this isn't a zero-sum game.
I'd like it more if it allowed the user to define the search pattern and output template for each created feed like some services which I already use and pay for do.
[1] http://www.kuro5hin.org/section/Diary if anyone cares. The RSS feed points to the main page rather than the diaries page.