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.