Over the weekend Adam Kalsey announced his new service, Feed Crier. Feed Crier pushes RSS/ATOM feeds though AIM (other IM networks are reported to be supported later). Subscribing to a feed is as simple as IM’ing feedcrier with ‘subscribe ‘ on AIM.
Feed Crier accounts come in two flavors, free and the $4 per month Pro account. The free account allows you to subscribe up to 3 feeds. The Pro account allows for unlimited feeds, no advertising (?), feed summaries and the ability to manage your feeds via the web. I’m not sure if the no advertising feature of the Pro account means that that Feed Crier won’t display their own ads or if they’ll strip ads from feeds you subscribe to.
I was able to subscribe to my own feed for this blog and got a quick response asking me to click on a URL to verify my subscription. Once I verified Feed Crier sent me messages containing a linked title to recent entries. Unsubscribing was just as easy, I sent ‘unsubscribe ‘ to Feed Crier and quickly got a response back.
I’m not a big user of IM so I don’t know that I’ll make much use of this. As a concept though I think this is a neat idea. With the popularity of feeds this allows you to glue pretty much any data to your IM client. I could see this being really useful for those who want to keep very close tabs on a feed. And if you are using this on Mac OS X then Growl makes it even more awesome.
I’m curious how Adam is tracking updates to feeds. When you subscribe to a feed does Feed Crier start polling that feed? Perhaps he’ll be looking at adding a ping server to get notifications of feed updates.
2 replies on “Feed Crier”
Thanks for the positive review, Joseph.
When you subscribe to a feed, Feed Crier starts watching that feed for updates. Only feeds with an active subscription are monitored. Using hueristics to determine the best polling frequency, Feed Crier can send you an update within minutes of it being posted online. The goal is to reduce this to seconds.
Although you’re not a big IM user, you might still find this useful. Many applications and web sites are creating alerts via IM now. If you need to stay on top of those in real time, email or a feed reader often doesn’t cut it.
I could certainly see this being helpful for feeds that you want to know as quickly as possible. Combined with Growl on Mac OS X this makes for a nice way to see new feed entries right away.