We’ve finally finished up the new Vicito release, looking forward to hearing what you think!  Here’s a quick summary of what is new:

• Watch any RSS feed you like in addition to watching general news sources for keywords.  We will send you all the items from the RSS feed; the general news watch phrases don’t apply to your feeds.
• The web dashboard contains a collection of links for the phrases and RSS feeds you’re watching for.  You can also adjust your account settings and alert options from the dashboard.
• E-mail alerts give you a digest of breaking news stories and RSS feed items.

Enjoy, and as always let us know if you’d like to see any new features or have suggestions for improving the existing service.

As some of you may have noticed, we’ve been having a lot of trouble with the Windows Live Messenger bot recently.  To make a long story short, there are some maximum user limitations that we’ve hit up against and resolving this with Microsoft has proven very difficult.  Regretfully, we have decided to take down the Windows Live Messenger bot permanently until a feasible arrangement with Microsoft is found.

We know this will come as an unwelcome development to many of you, however we invite you to switch over to the Google Talk or AIM news bot to continue getting the same service you had with Windows Live Messenger.  If you don’t already have an account on AIM or Google Talk, getting one is easy - just head on over to our Help page for instructions.

Thanks to everyone who has been using the service up to this point, and please forgive the growing pains.  Also stay tuned for a major new feature release soon (yes, we’re still working on it!).

Just wanted to give everyone a little shout out - we’re still alive and kicking. We’ve been deep in development mode adding the next round of features to make the service even better. We hope to launch the upgrade in the next couple months, until then stay tuned and enjoy!

We’d like to thank the guys over at ReadWriteWeb for a nice writeup about our new service. I had a nice little exchange with one of their bloggers Josh Catone and he asked some really insightful questions - thanks Josh! They run a solid blog for all of you tech news junkies out there, I highly recommend it. (We also scan their stories in our service, so you might see something pop up from them every now and again).

On to the new mini feature release - we’ve added some modifiers to the search phrases. Now you can explicitly specify and (using &), or (using |) and not (using -) operators in your news search phrases. The most useful one for me is the not operation so I can weed out unwanted matches. Let’s run through a few examples so you get the feel.

• add global warming -penguins - This one would watch for news about global warming, but would not match any stories also mentioning penguins. Not that we have anything against penguins, but you get the point.
• add cats | dogs - Here we would be searching for news matching cats or dogs. Yeah, umm, for all you cat and dog lovers out there.
• add cats & dogs - This one searches for cats and dogs. This is actually the default behavior when you write a simple search like add cats dogs, so this example is not very interesting. But you can use the & operator in combination with the other operators to do something more interesting.

Those familiar with advanced searches in Google or Yahoo will recognize (and I hope appreciate) this little upgrade. Enjoy and keep the feedback rolling in!

Its been a wild last couple of weeks. We’re happy to see a nice jump up in our user sign-ups and we’ve managed to squash a few issues that weren’t fleshed out in our small-scale tests. We also got a nice influx of Italian users and even added a few Italian-language news feeds by popular demand. Adding support for multiple languages is something we’re definitely looking into for new features down the road. We have also been steadily adding more news feeds to keep up with our insatiable demand for more and more news.

…And what a crazy last couple weeks it has been! The world stock markets are dropping like lead balloons, the US primary election race is heating up (along with all the mud-slinging and maneuvering you could want), and the unrest in the Middle East keeps up its steady drum beat. There was no lack of dramatic news items flowing across our instant messaging clients. As we plow into 2008, it’s shaping up so far to be a year of turmoil and drama. Stay tuned.

As always, we love to hear what you like about Vicito News, what you’d love to see, and what you want to see improved. We also like getting suggestions on news feeds to add. Keep the feedback coming. We won’t bite.

Hi everyone out there. We’re happy to announce the launch of our new instant messaging service - Vicito News. Our goal is to make it easy to keep up to date on news you’re interested in. We’re confirmed news junkies and just have to keep up to date on all the latest political, tech, and financial news even when we’re busy doing ‘real work’! That’s why we created Vicito News - we wanted something that would search tons of news feeds and just let us know when something relevant popped up. We also didn’t want to have yet another piece of software to install, run, learn, and upgrade. That’s why we chose to integrate with the top instant messaging clients (AIM, Google Talk, and Windows Live Messenger).

One of the most fun parts about the service is that as we keep adding more news feeds, you might get a link from a new news source you may have never tapped into before. Go ahead and and drop by the home page for all the details on what our service can offer. For some more detailed information the help page has some tips on getting started with instant messaging and talking to our trusty news bot. Feel free to contact us with any suggestions or issues you might find.

Have fun and welcome!

(By the way while we were putting up the blog we came across a really cool comment spam blocker - you know one of those wavy text things to make sure the commenter is human and not some spam-bot. Anyway, this thing helps digitize old books while fighting spam - now that is absolutely brilliant! Pop over to reCAPTCHA and spread the word)