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Adam Kalsey

This is the blog of Adam Kalsey. Unusual depth and complexity. Rich, full body with a hint of nutty earthiness.

Introducing Feed Crier

19 Aug 2006

The town crier of old made sure that everyone was informed of important news and events. Today he’s back and powered by RSS and Instant Messaging.

Feed Crier is an IM bot that delivers real-time RSS feed updates to your desktop over popular instant messaging protocols. For end users, no account creation is necessary—just send a message to the bot (screen name "feedcrier") containing a feed URL and start getting feed alerts. Basic services are free, with premium services costing just a few dollars a month.

If you want to give your site’s readers an easy way to subscribe by IM, there’s a little "Add this feed to Feed Crier" button available. Publishers wanting a customized, branded feed alert service can hook into the Feed Crier API and provide readers with customized IM feed alerts. Publisher pricing is based on user volume.

Both Tailrank and TagJag have signed on to use Feed Crier to provide IM alerts to their users.

Currently, Feed Crier is in beta using the AOL Instant Messenger protocol. Support for other IM protocols including Yahoo, MSN, and Jabber is under development. Thanks to Kevin Burton and Jesper for extensive testing and feedback as I developed this.

Please use it and abuse it. There’s probably feeds out there that it doesn’t work with yet. Report those or any other oddities to me and I’ll get them fixed right away.

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