Why Kiva Notify?
The standard way to find a loan to lend to on Kiva is via the Kiva Lend page. This page enables you to search for loans based on certain criteria. However, for most people the criteria they use to select loans do not change that often (for example: you're interested in loan request for Africa within the agriculture sector). It's cumbersome to go to the Kiva Lend page several times a day to check if there is a loan request that meets your criteria. It would be much nicer if you're notified that a relevant loan request is submitted to Kiva such that you can immediately jump to the details and decide if you want to lend or not.Kiva Notify takes your criteria and constantly checks if there a new loans that meet your criteria. If a match is found, it immediately tweets you with the loan request details. This tweet will immediately show up in your Twitter client (on computer or phone).
Using Kiva Notify you can specify your criteria once and let the loans find you, instead of you having to actively check the Kiva Lend page.
Why not use the RSS feeds?
The Kiva Lend page allows you to specify criteria and create a custom RSS feed based on these criteria. Two problems:- You can only create an RSS feed if there is currently a loan that matches your criteria at that point in time
- There is a delay in reading RSS feeds because most people are not constantly monitoring their RSS feeds and RSS readers check for new items at larger intervals.
Both problems will make you notice the loan too late and by then it is already fully funded or it does not even show up in your RSS feed.