Hi folks,
I was really pleased this morning to wake up and see the flight alert beta released…thanks for the hard work, FlightAware!
I am wondering if it’s possible in flight alerts to enter an airline prefix, and have it alert you with the specified information for all those fleets. For example, I could enter in “AMT” and get all the ATA flight alerts?
Thanks!
-Nick Bartolotta
The best way to find out is to enter “AMT” or whatever and see what happens.
Yep I did that, and didn’t get any notifications so I assume that means the function is not available. I suppose my post was meant to be more of a suggestion or idea.
Do you have Jabber, or whatever the hell that is? After reading the announcement a second time, I realized that it is only currently working with this Jabber thing.
Way to go FA staff!! Could you have picked a more obscure program to do beta testing with?
Just kidding…
“Jabber is best known as “the Linux of instant messaging” – an open, secure, ad-free alternative to consumer IM services like AIM, ICQ, MSN, and Yahoo.”
Current we only offers alerts for individual aircraft.
Jabber is the only IM system it works with – the e-mail components are generic.
If you have a Google Mail account then you have a Jabber account as well via Google Talk.
We chose Jabber as the initial platform because it is an open and documented protocol. Eventual support for AIM/MSN/Yahoo will be trickier because those protocols are not open and compatibility can be a challenge. We decided that it would be more productive to simply focus on Jabber initially so that we wouldn’t be fighting two battles at once.
The Jabber comments were more sarcasm than anything. HOWEVER, did learn something and the explanation from the nuggster was good.
His explanation always is. It must be the goatee. (that where he hides the “smart”.)
I love the new alert feature, but would be giddy if I could be alerted if a specific aircraft was enroute, landing or departing a specific airport.
Any thoughts?
Keithpilot
I have tried entering my Gmail username in the Jabber IM box in my profile in multiple formats without getting any of my alerts. Can anyone tel me how I should be entering my Gmail username in there? 
You should enter it in the format of a regular e-mail address. We were having some trouble with Jabber over the last day or two, so that was likely the source of your difficulty. I apologize for any inconvenience; it should be all set now.
So maybe I just don’t get it? I put three commercial flights into the flight alerts tonight. I got all my email is a few seconds after the flight aware page changed, but I am still not getting any messages on my Google talk. At this point I am just on a mission to see if I can get this IM thing to work or not! I would really like to be able to be alerted to different a/c I watch in my IM window rather than emails and SMS. 
Hmm – try adding alerts@alerts.flightaware.com to your contact list. I’m receiving them OK, but we run our own Jabber server here that may be more flexible, especially when the sender is in the same domain (flightaware.com)
Either by coincidence or by adding flightaware to my contacts it is now working. This is how the process went: To add FA to my googleTalk contacts it actually sent you an invitation. As soon as I did that I began getting alerts. I have since removed FA as a conact (since it only said an invitation had been sent anyway) and it was still working as of last night. I am going to add a few aircraft this morning and see if it still works. I have to say… it was VERY cool to have my alerts just pop like that! 8)
Here’s an AWESOME instant messaging program!
It’s free, and it works with Jabber, AOL, Yahoo, ICQ, MSN, IRC, Napster and a couple of other more obscure messaging services. It has lots of the popular options and features. So if you use one or more of the IM services, give it a try. No sense in having a Jabber client - AND - and an AOL IM client - AND - a MSN IM client - AND - a Yahoo messenger client. One application in one window does it all!
It’s official, it still works! Don’t know if the adding FA to my contacts, then removing them, helped or not.
That’s great debugging, thanks! I’m going to experiment with techniques to have alerts send an “add me” request to users when they add or update a jabber address. That might solve the problem long-term.
It’s not working again today. My airplane has been busy last night and today, haven’t gotten the first IM alert. I tried using both GoogleTalk and GAIM to be sure it wasn’t my software. 
It was on our side this time – delays or problems with outbound alerts as part of our changes to prevent being blocked by ISPs. 
You should be all set now.