Nobody Told You? Get Yotified!
Here’s the analogy: You, a person with two arms, are given 12 tools to go and do stuff with, but you can only pick up, maximum, two at a time. To even use both at the same time would get confusing, like patting your head and rubbing your belly and yodeling. So instead, you hire a 12-armed dodecapus with a computer brain to grab all the tools and keep you updated on what it’s doing while it works. You don’t even have to pay this dodecapus. All you have to do is sign up for a free account.
Yotify is that 12-armed octopus I speak of.
Here’s how you use it: Create a “Scout” keyed to Craigslist, YouTube, Hotels.com, shopping sites like eBay, blogs, or mainstream media. When your information is found, the Scout reports back to you as often or periodical as you’d like, hourly or daily. As of now, notifications are through email, though notification through the site itself is the next step.
The idea is to send as many scouts out as you want, looking for what you need on the big website hubs. Say you go to Craigslist and are looking for a foldout mattress that turns into a chair, and you need it to be close by. Instead of checking Craigslist every day for your match, just tell your scout to notify you when it finds one. At the same time, you could be searching eBay for decommissioned cartoon watches, travel sites for tickets under a certain price, or news about the latest presidential polls. (12 arms getting busier…)
Some scouts are more simple than others, allowing only keyword searches and reporting frequency, but others allow a fine-tuned search, such as a product dropping below a certain price. Another colorful thing Yotify can yotify youof is a change in a profile at LinkedIn of a certain user, and then once there is a change, email all of your coworkers.
And if you’ve successfully programmed a great scout that’s worked for you, you can share it with users on the site, or mooch off of others, the American way. I mean share. Share, the American way.
As of now, Yotify is only programmable to certain websites, and can’t just scout any site you wish, but they’re working on it. Hopefully, as the private beta turns into a public full-blown search monster (a friendly one of course), we can all begin sending out our scouting spies and have the engine work for us, without having to continually search manually with our own two hands. 12 is so much better. So either go buy a dodecapus, or sign up for Yotify.
