Trackle – Track everything on the Internet

Posted on February 15, 2009 at 5:06 am

Have you ever wanted to have one place to go on the Internet where you could track all of your online activities? If you use a lot of social networking sites, you have probably already heard of life streaming services like FriendFeed or Pownce, Jaiku, and Plurk.

These sites let you combine your individual social RSS feeds into one big streaming feed of all your activities. This is really great if you want to track your or a friends activity across social networks and services like Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, and more.

However, what if you wanted to track something other than social networks and services? What do I mean? Let’s say you want to track crime in your neighborhood or track the value of your home or track FDA food advisories/recalls? How would you go about doing that?

Trackle is a cool new website that lets you track just about anything on the web that you would care to track. Basically, the way it works is that you create an account and then add customizable “tracklets”.

So what kind of stuff can you track? Lots! What I really like about this site is that it has a large number of predefined tracklets, which you can easily customize for your location, preference, etc.

So if you click on “Trackle crime in your neighborhood”, you will be able to enter your home address, the distance from your address you want to track, and what types of crime you want to track.

By default, all items will show up in your Trackle inbox, but you can also have the the alerts sent to you via email or via SMS. Pretty neat eh? The cool thing is that they have a ton of categories, so you can track anything from books to stocks to sports to weather.

Other useful tracklets that I saw include tracking breaking news, tracking celebrity gossip, tracking LinkedIn updates, tracking low air fares, and tracking people on the web. You can customize each one of the tracklets, meaning that if you add the celebrity gossip tracklet, you can specify a keyword to track just your favorite actors and actresses.

You can also track blogs and RSS feeds so that you get alerted if they happen to mention one of your predefined keywords. For example, I setup a tracklet to get an alert whenever Engadget writes about the Palm Pre. That way I don’t have to keep visiting their site if that’s all I care about.

Overall, it’s a pretty neat idea and one that has been setup well initially to be useful. I’m sure with future features and updates, the service will have more tracklets and more customization options. Enjoy!

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