I’ve been looking at this solution for a while but the MSN Alert for business signup page on Microsoft seem to be down/non existant but you can still get the service through MessageCast. I have not enquired about the paid services but right now they are offering bloggers a free trial. If you look to the right on my menu you’ll see I’ve added the link for people to subscribe to my blog updates via MSN Messenger. So each time there’s a new post, people will be alerted via IM, email or cell phone depending what they choose. It didn’t work for me somehow because the MSN Alerts seem to be having problems but try it and see if you have any luck.

I also took a quick run around the administration. It’s quite cool, you can see who your subscribers are and some stats. I’m sure the paid versions will have more options. It’s still an experimental thing – like 99% of the stuff at TBM is 🙂 but hey you get to benefit from my tests and trials. Still, I think this will be quite useful and beneficial for several reasons.

1. People are mobile and don’t like to be tethered to their PC’s but they like web content to go where they go. So sending alerts they subscribe to, to a cell phone is pretty convenient. I can just see it. If you have a local retail store and send the latest deal alert out. The customer sees it on his/her phone and decides to pop into the store. As an affiliate that would also work. Of course that is the ideal situation. Not sure how often that will happen.
2. Newbies – Many internet newbies learn email first and one of the next ventures is Instant Messengers. IM’s are popular and people are already familiar with it. Some may not want to take time to learn how to read news through an RSS aggregator or just don’t want another thing to check. IM is a great step in to get the most out of your RSS.

I’m sure there are many more benefits that my brain is refusing to cough up at 2am – let me know what you think.