The problem with My Yahoo! is that although it allows you to add feeds easily, and indeed, is the most popular web-based feed reader around the world, yet, it does not give previews of content. So when I came across the new Yahoo! Alerts site which gave me the option to register for alerts whenever my fave feed is updated, I jumped for it. Already, using feeds was becoming a problem in Yahoo! Mail Beta because the new BlogSpot feeds which have a new ‘atom:updated’ field, which means that every time you make a post, the whole thing is republished and the new date gets added to each post. This is a big falw, because even if I’ve read something already, and then you make an update, it’ll come up as a new post. The workaround it to use something like FeedBurner to manage your post feed.
Coming back to Yahoo! Alerts, the problem I faced was that it wasn’t delivering me alerts whenever the feed URL for a BlogSpot blog was of the new style, as in http://blogname.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default and that really sucked. I, for one, knew that some blogs were updated, still no alert.
I racked my brains, and came up with a workaround. I think the problem is cropping up since no specific filename is used in the new style. I found that the old style feed URL (of type http://blogname.blogspot.com/rss.xml) for Blogger.com blogs even on the new Blogger are still live. Subscribing to that solved my problem.
However, I did write to the Yahoo! Alerts team to do something about this, for comment feeds for BlogSpot blogs, which were not available earlier, and are of type http://blogname.blogspot.com/feeds/comments/default cannot be subscribed in any other way except the new URL. Correct me if I am wrong.
I may point out here, the problem only occurs with Blogger feeds, not others.
I never really liked any alternative like Bloglines or Google Reader. And with Yahoo! Alerts I’m happy. It also offers alerts via messenger and mobile.