you could just check yahoo daily, on the homepage they feature the biggest things that recently happened.

Hey, cool! I had a pager that did this for me!

TheInternet - The difference is this is a "push" model vs a "pull" model. Going to a webpage to get information is "pull" (I actively seek out information from a service). This alert system is "push" (the service tells me via my cell phone if something *really* important is happening).

Could be pretty simple to get a prototype working. You would just need an SMS gateway and a program to access digg capture top stories. A lot of ideas have an SMS element.

Maybe someone could buy one and rent out its usage to the community... (Who was it in the forums that said in a gold rush sell pick axes...)

Pretty decent idea, you might have to change your avatar for me to take you seriously, but I like the idea. :-) Would it be a paid service ?

People all ready subscribe to feeds and what ever topic they want on news sites.

For example:
http://news.bbc.co.u.../hi/help/5194672.stm

I have read "The 4-Hour Work Week" (even signed up with GetFriday) and I think it's important to remember what Tim said about stopping news consumption:

He said if anything truly big happened, you'd hear about it from your friends and in daily conversations.

However, all that aside, I think CNN has something like this in the form of "breaking news" notifications.

Sort like need is also in companies I think. Though more an alarm information. To inform people what todo when their is disaster in the company building.

KC - Thanks for pointing out that link. That's the gist of the idea, although the differentiator here is that you would be able to have a little more control of the frequency and type of alerts you are getting. For example, the BBC alerts happen about 12 times a month about mainstream news stories. With this idea, you could specify a certain topic and the threshold (for example, "notify me when a <tech> news story gets <5,000> diggs)

CC - very good point. I think that's where the ability to choose a certain topic comes into play. For example, my friends aren't really into gaming or politics, so I might want to set alerts for gaming and politics. I wouldn't necessarily want to set an alert just for regular news or celebrity events, because I likely could get those from daily conversations.

Thanks for all the comments, I've updated the original idea to reflect a few of the points you guys brought up. Any additional feedback is very much appreciated!

Easy enough idea that I think could be very popular. Not sure exactly how you'd monetize it, but possibly through a premium service of some sort down the road.

The point is there are all ready sms alert services by every major news company:
CNN:
http://edition.cnn.com/mobile/
Google News:
http://www.google.com/alerts
( Type you phone number at you carrier phonenumber@messaging.nextel.com )
USAToday
http://www.usatoday.com/mobile/index.htm
MSNBC:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/

KC - True, but those are mainstream news companies. I think this proves there is a market for sms alert services. The differeniator here is that you can customize the frequency and type of alerts you are getting.

TechGuy - I see monetization coming from simple ads. For example, at the bottom of the text message, a simple "This alert was brought to you by the good people at <insert tech company here>". Since the users can customize the types of alerts they receive, we can effectively target the ads (i.e. celebrity ads for people signed up for celebrity alerts, political ads for people signed up for political alerts, etc..).

Well, there is also many local news SMS as well. I just did not post them.

http://www.dallasnews.com/alerts/
http://www.boston.com/news/mobile/
http://www.klfy.com/
http://news.sky.com/skynews/sms

Anyone with a simple email list can send SMS news alerts it is not hard for local news sites to do this at all. You can also easily customize the type of news by category already. You can also sort by keywords and such with some sites.

The only true difference with your idea is you can customize the frequency and that is about it. As for the ads thing I have seen that before with SMS.

Isn't this just a question of sending DIGG's rss feeds as sms messages?

I think anathema has it. Probably the 7 days top stories feed?
http://digg.com/rss/...oplinksnews7days.xml

i think there's already ways to have rss feeds sent via sms (with no help from the supplier of the feed itself).
steve rubel's blog micro persuasion has some lists of techniques like this, you'll have to look around for it though:
http://www.micropersuasion.com/
he's a gmail/productivity wiz with tons of cool tips, you're bound to find it in there somewhere.
all i remember off the top of my head is 1 called feedcrier which sends selected feeds to IM, but i'm pretty sure they exist for sms as well.

anyway even if not, i think this is more like a lifehack waiting to be figured out than a business...

Like I said before ( Type you phone number @ you carrier sms server example: phonenumber@messaging.nextel.com )

The point isn't to get rss feeds via sms. The point is that you can choose the *frequency* and *type* of alerts you want to get. If you only want a few alerts a month, and only for gadget news, that is what you get. If you want to get 10 alerts a day for celebrity gossip, you can get that as well.

Sorry if the original idea is unclear, if anyone has any other ideas of how to phrase this I would love to hear it.

Facebook app?

How will you make money?

Cougar, you can already get feeds for categories and subcategories. You can kind of adjust the frequency of the feed using the diggs daily, 7days, 30days criteria. It sounds like you want to make something with more powerful filters? There might be something out there already. Try googling "digg tools". There is a ton. One I saw was called diggfiltr, but didn't seem to be working..