byTAGG: An RSS Reader/Alerter for Blogs and Twitter

I just came across a new RSS reader desktop application called byTAGG. It’s a little different than the RSS programs that you may be familiar with because it lets you subscribe to other things besides feeds. Not only that, but it lets you filter your subscriptions by keywords, too.

When you go to add a feed, you enter in either the URL or the RSS URL and then you can optionally enter in keywords with which to filter the feed. So, for example, if you wanted to subscribe to a gadget blog but were only interested in news about a particular subject (like “Xbox!”), you could do so with this app.

You can also subscribe to keywords instead of feeds. You can enter in a keyword (ex: “twitter,” “obama”) and then check a box as to whether you want to see results just from news sites, just from blogs, or from the entire web. There’s even an advanced option that lets you specify whether you want to search for an exact phrase, search for multiple words, exclude certain words, or just search for results from one website.

Finally, a Twitter search feature lets you configure keyword alerts for a specific person’s Twitter account. You can do the same for your own Twitter account, too, but I don’t know why you’d need to – you know what you tweeted, right?

All your results display in byTAGG’s clean and simple interface. Overall, this is a nifty application that can serve as a nice complement to your RSS reader although it probably won’t replace it.

The application runs on Windows XP, 2000, and Vista, but I tried it on Windows 7 RC and had no issues. You can grab a copy for yourself from here.