Distract Yourself with IM Feeds
June 9th, 2008 (8:00am) Mike Gunderloy 1 CommentTweet This
We’ve looked at wide variety of RSS readers in the past. But what if there is RSS information so important that you want it to interrupt your work day? That’s when you turn to new service IM Feeds, which offers a simple RSS-to-instant-message gateway. This has been done before (for example, by Feed Crier) but I find the IM Feeds implementation a little more straightforward. Just add their bot to your account (they support Yahoo, MSN, AIM, and GTalk) and send it a message to get started.
After you’ve set up your account this way, you just send a message to subscribe or unsubscribe from a feed. Once you’re subscribed, updates show up in your instant messaging client. This is most useful for tracking constantly-updated feeds, or for important feeds like server status messages. The main drawback: you can’t change the polling frequency. Still, for those feeds where you want to be sure you never miss a message, this is a useful service.
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We designed IM Feeds to be as user-friendly as possible, as such we made the default polling very aggressive (polls every ~5 minutes). If we get feedback from users or publishers that the polling is done too much, then we will let users chose a polling frequency; but that hasn’t been an issue yet.
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