News Alerts

News moves fast, and so do you. Now you can set and receive news alerts from twitter, and change your alerts in real-time. Think of it as Google News Alerts on speed. We use a simple query syntax, along with the ability to limit your search to specific news sites.

You can either create alerts using search phrases, and optionally restrict to a set of sources, or you can create alerts for specific journalists that Daylife is tracking. You can also execute searches and get responses sent back to you immediately.

The Daylife twitter server works by receiving commands through twitter. You can send commands either through the "@daylife_feed" reply mechanism, or you can send direct messages "d daylife_feed". For example, to receive news alerts about "Bank of America" from the new york times,and all articles by Paul Krugman, first follow daylife_feed, then send the alert registration command:

FOLLOW daylife_feed
@daylife_feed sub alert "Bank of America" s:nytimes.com
@daylife_feed sub journalist paul krugman

Or if you prefer to keep your bot commands private:

FOLLOW daylife_feed
@daylife_feed hello
-- wait for daylife_feed to respond and follow you --
d daylife_feed sub alert "Bank of America" s:nytimes.com
d daylife_feed sub journalist paul krugman

Other fun subscriptions:

@daylife_feed sub alert google s:prnewswire.com  (press releases that mention google)
@daylife_feed sub alert "john mccain" s:foxnews.com  (FOX News articles that mention John McCain)
@daylife_feed sub journalist maureen dowd  (all of Maureen Dowd's articles)
@daylife_feed sub alert INTC s:marketwatch.com  (MarketWatch mentions of INTC - Intel)

Please note that response times are generally about 5 minutes for commands, and 20 minutes or so for initial registration, in order to ensure that our load on the Twitter API is as low as possible. Once they have raised their API usage limits, we will increase our response time.

Creating a Search-Based Alert

• If you haven't already done so, follow daylife_feed (log into your twitter account, and click on the "follow" link on this page, or send "FOLLOW daylife_feed"). You only have to do this once.
• Send a subscription command to daylife_feed with the format below, substituting "iraq withdrawal timeline" with your own query:
  

  @daylife_feed sub alert iraq withdrawal timeline

  
  Now you will receive alerts about any articles that contain those three words. The Label for the alert will be returned to you in a message.
• (Optional) You can restrict the search to a specific url or set of urls, by listing a set of domains separated by commas (no spaces in between!):
  

  @daylife_feed sub alert iraq withdrawal s:nytimes.com,huffingtonpost.com

• (Optional) You can specify a custom label after the "sub alert" command using the label tag. The label must be one word, no spaces.
  

  @daylife_feed sub alert label:myalert iraq withdrawal

• (Optional) You can also search for quoted strings, for example:
  

  @daylife_feed sub alert "withdrawal timeline" iraq

Some examples:

• All news from nytimes.com or cnn.com containing the words "iraq" and "obama":
  

  @daylife_feed sub alert iraq obama s:nytimes.com,cnn.com

• All news containing the phrase "global warming" and diesel:
  

  @daylife_feed sub alert "global warming" diesel

• All news from buzzmachine.com mentioning Dell, labeling the alert "dellhell"
  

  @daylife_feed sub alert label:dellhell Dell s:buzzmachine.com

Showing an Alert

You can query an alert by it's label. The label will be shown in the alerts you receive, or you can look it up through the confirmation that you received when you created it. For example, in the following alert:

Hispanics seek McCain's reassurance http://bit.ly/1xj5Ot [washingtontimes.com] (alert 3, 16 more @ http://bit.ly/1YWf8P)

The label is "3". To determine the search phrase and any site restrictions for this query, you can ask daylife_feed:

@daylife_feed show alert 2

Deleting an Alert

To unsubscribe from alerts, use the command shown below, and reference the alert by its label. See the "Showing an Alert" section for a description of how to determine the label. Or use "all" to unsubscribe from all alerts.

@daylife_feed unsub alert 2

Journalist Subscriptions

We are experimenting with various ways of distributing news over Twitter. You can subscribe to a stream of news from a journalist by following daylife_feed, and sending a simple message. Whenever we identify an article as being from the journalist, we will send the headline and a link to the article to your twitter account as a direct message.

To find journalists, try the search tool to the right of the page. Enter the name of the journalist, click "GO", and make sure that's the journalist you are looking for. Then enter their name exactly as it appears on our web site into the subscription command. At some point we'll add code to the journalist pages so that you can grab the necessary subscription command, but since this isn't generally available yet, you have to copy it manually.

Journalists are only in our database if the publication for which they write identifies them in their RSS feed, and their feed is in our system. The journalists aren't affiliated with Daylife, we are simply scraping the web content and providing you with links, much like Google Alerts.

Subscribing

• Follow daylife_feed (log into your twitter account, and click on the "follow" link on this page, or send "FOLLOW daylife_feed"). You only have to do this once.
• Send the following message:
  

  @daylife_feed sub journalist <journalist name>

  
  For example, to subscribe to jeff jarvis, send:
  

  @daylife_feed sub journalist jeff jarvis

Unsubscribing

To unsubscribe, use the same format as above, but with "unsub" instead of "sub". Or to unsubscribe from everything:

@daylife_feed unsub all

You can also stop following daylife_feed, and articles will no longer be sent to you.

Real-Time Search

You can also just search for the most recent news:

@daylife_feed search yahoo boss

By default you will recieve three matches, in three separate messages. As always, you'll need to FOLLOW daylife_feed. You can get more (up to 10) or less by adding a number after the search command:

@daylife_feed search 10 yahoo boss

And you can search only specific sites using the "s:" label described in the alert section:

@daylife_feed search iraq s:huffingtonpost.com

Alert Format

The alerts will show the title of the article, a link to it, and the source in brackets. The name of the alert that generated the message will appear in parentheses. For example:

Election results could change family dynamic in the White House http://bit.ly/2vbN4Z [dailyillini.com] (alert 4)

In some cases, if an alert results in too many matches, you may receive notification of additional items, and be given a link to the Daylife search page:

Senate OKs promotions of Iraq generals http://bit.ly/Hf1N5 [outsidethebeltway.com] (alert 1, 65 more @ http://bit.ly/1YWf8P)

In this case, the alert is on the words "iraq" and "withdrawal timeline". The results are bundled in this fashion to prevent too many messages being sent to your twitter account. To limit the number of messages, you can also limit the alert to a specific news organization or group of organizations, or make the search phrase more restrictive.