I thought this was pretty cool. But I was expecting Microsoft to be the first to introduce this feature. Immedi.at gives you a bookmarklet which you click on when the website you want has a auto-discoverable RSS feed (or click on the bookmarklet when you are on the actual feed url). But I find it inconvenient that Immedi.at doesn’t save my IM settings so I have to re-enter them every time I want to bookmark a new feed for IM alerts.
immedi.at helps you to keep track of online information as it changes. It sends you an instant message whenever any RSS or Atom feed you want to monitor changes. immedi.at works with all major IM carriers including MSN Messenger, Yahoo Messenger, Google Talk, Jabber, and AIM/ICQ.
http://immedi.at/
A friend and IM-collaborator, Eric Thom of RSSapplied.com, needs an RSS consultant and blogger immediately.
RSS Applied has been focused on the business opportunities presented by RSS and Weblogs for years, and we’re ready to bring another person onboard. This position will involve intense daily research focused on the latest RSS technology news, business blogging strategies, corporate communications, podcasting applications, as well as blog design and navigation.
All inquires should be addressed to manage@rssapplied.com
RSS-feed.org is a beta site that lets you create a publicly accessible webpage that shows news from all your favourite news sources — as long as they have an RSS feed. Right now RSS-feed.org doesn’t allow you to add just any feed (only the ones they’ve selected), but the existence of this service only highlights that people want to have a say in how they have news displayed to them. RSS may be hot, but it’s not how everyone wants to consume news. A significant portion of people just don’t want to use a feed reader for whatever reason and Web 2.0 engineers need to take notice.
This week, I made Macgregator, a webpage that aggregates news in Mac-related topics that I’m interested in. Although I judiciously use an RSS feed reader, I don’t want to constantly consume Mac news. Although I’ve been using a Mac for over a decade, I’m just not that interested in the latest and the greatest in everything Mac. I sporadically read Mac stuff from a few sources and I needed a way that lets me do it conveniently without having to bombard me with reminders of that I’m missing out. I want to consume some news when I want and if I want to — not when some robot tells me to. For me, that’s why sites like RSS-feed.org will have a place in the future.
Feed-mail.com is an interesting, if quite unusable concept. It’s email sent via RSS feeds. You subscribe to your Feed-mail feed and you get emails that are sent to that feed. Less spam, more secure. But the sender has to login to his Feed-mail account in order to send a message. And there’s no SMTP service either so you’re locked into Feed-mail’s interface. And one thing that irked me was that my password was inscribed into the feed’s url in plain. Major security risk. And I reckon Feed-mail also has the same security problem as receiving Gmail via Bloglines or any public RSS aggregator — you have to ensure that your feed has privacy settings. Feed-mail is still in beta so things might improve on usability.
Newsgator has just released their API. Developers will have access to the following types of services:
- Complete subscription management capabilities
- Subscription synchronization between all products using the API, including NewsGator Online, NewsGator Outlook edition, FeedDemon, and others
- Post-level status synchronization (read/unread/deleted status)
- Bandwidth optimization by downloading only new content
- Community and individual ratings of feed content
Now I can understand the usefulness of releasing the API for middleware like Feedburner’s API, but I don’t understand the benefit for developers or end users of releasing the API for a client application. The only party I see benefiting from this directly is Newsgator itself.
To understand why I think Feedblitz.com is so great, you need to know a bit of history. Both Feedblitz and Bloglet.com are services for bloggers to offer email subscriptions to their blog posts. Bloglet has the distinction of being the oldest blog-to-email service — it goes so far back that when it started, RSS wasn’t invented yet and it catered exclusive for the Blogger.com crowd. But Bloglet development stalled years ago. Till this day, it doesn’t have email address validation of subscribers and subscription admins don’t have any control over their subscriber base. You can’t delete badly-typed email addresses and you can’t export your subscriber list. Bloglet subscription admins are basically trapped with Bloglet.
Which is where Feedblitz comes in. Feedblitz gives me the chance to finally dump Bloglet and move all my subscribers out to a service that does have email validation and gives me some control over the subscription feed. You can tell Feedblitz to login to Bloglet and grab all the information out of your account, including the list of all the subscribers. I just managed to rescue all my Bloglet subscribers! Given the size of the userbase of Bloglet, I don’t know why no one had thought to do this before. It’s long overdue.
So I am now offering blog-to-email subscriptions again — but this time using Feedblitz’s email form:
Randy has published a list of the most popular feeds that are being subscribed to via his RSS-to-email service. I chuckled when I saw that an RSS blog (Randy’s) is one of the top ten for email subscription. Apart from that rather obvious observation, I can’t contribute much else, except that I noticed significant numbers were subscribed to Chinese-only blogs. This got me to thinking: how many of the popular online RSS feed readers support multi-language interfaces? Bloglines.com is one. Yahoo and MSN of course do (they’ve supported Chinese interfaces long before they had RSS feed readers). But Newsgator.com, Pluck.com and Rojo.com do not.
I’m subscribed to Godaddy.com’s RSS feeds for their domain auctions. Great stuff. I just learned that Portugal.com is up for sale for USD4.5million. And on the other hand the owner of Michaeljacksonisdead.com wants USD175,000 for that. I’m going to keep these RSS feeds subscribed just for their amusement value. As an added bonus, I learned from the sale of thechokinggame.com (USD$500) of a strange new trend that American kids are getting into - choking each other to see who passes out first.
I like myprogs.net because it introduces me to new softwares for OSX. But unlike other software directories, this one comes with recommendations. I get to see what other people are using and have enjoyed so much that they tell me about them. Sometimes, in the descriptions, I even find out why they liked the software. I’m subscribed to the RSS feed for OSX.