Adam Kalsey, a founder and former CTO of RSS vendor Pheedo, released a new service last night called FeedCrier that makes it easy to receive rapid notification of new items in an RSS feed by IM. The service currently supports only AIM but Kalsey says that will change soon. Free accounts are limited, but premium subscribers can monitor an unlimited number of feeds, remove ads in the alerts, use a web interface to manage their alerts. Unlike other similar services FeedCrier also delivers item summaries and alerts received when users were offline. Premium accounts are $4 per month. There are other services available that are better for this in some ways, but there’s plenty of room for competition.
I think this is an important class of web tools, for consumers seeking to jump on sales quickly and professionals doing time sensitive work. Competitors include Peter Brown’s immedi.at (interviewed here), Eduard Sherstnev’s Zaptxt (watch this company in coming weeks) and the most sophisticated of them all, Rasasa, from the Netherlands. These other services are not limited to AIM, they offer autodiscovery bookmarklets and both Zaptxt and Rasasa incorporate SMS and email alerts as well. Rasasa’s push technology is the smartest, but isn’t supported by all US mobile vendors.
I’ve long thought that FeedBurner should team with one of these companies and sure enough, it was FeedBurner VP of business development Rick Klau’s blog where I learned about FeedCrier. Klau has a FeedFlare widget that publishers can use to provide a link to FeedCrier alerts for their feeds. The same could be done for other services with relative ease via the FeedFlare API. I think that increasingly powerful RSS to IM tools will be in demand as RSS use continues to grow – particularly in business.
I’ve been helping Adam beta test this for the last couple of weeks and I really like it… For a LOT of people I think this will fill a solid niche between desktop aggregators and online RSS aggregators (disclosure: Adam is an advisor to Tailrank).
I’m going to be adding this to Tailrank soon. (In fact I might do it right now).
With Tailrank’s custom memetracker stuff this would be killer. Basically you could monitor a few blogs (like Techcrunch for example) and when a story gets a lot of inbound links you could have it IM you.
Tailrank re-indexes everything in our database on at LEAST an hourly basis and with pings is usually faster so this could be a really awesome just-in-time event/meme delivery mechanism.
Kevin
Competition is the root of inventions.
It’s nice to see once in a while a Web2.0 Service that actually has a viable business model and a useful service that could really attract users and make money at the same time
As blogs and feeds gets more popular, such niche aggregating services will get more traction, especially taking into consideration the time-sensitivity of the feeds.
I’ve got a site I created called http://www.sabifoo.com/ which is sort of the opposite of this service. It creates an RSS feed from whatever you send to it via IM.
Could the combination of a personal meme tracker and alert service
be considered an easy and non obtrusive way to present “attention data”?
It could aggregate someone’s online activity sources and offer revenue based on contextual based ads.
Thanks for the writeup, Marshall.
As you noted, other IM services are coming soon. There’s also other non-IM notification options coming. A couple of unique things that bear mentioning… Feed Crier doesn’t require an account to use — just subscribe by sending an IM and you’re in. And Pro users get feed summaries in addition to a title and a link.
Feel free to contact me for more information or assistance but (how else?) IM. AIM screenname is akalsey.
In my view feedburner or others should be doing this as an enhancement to their existing service.
It is crazy, why do we need to have a company for every small feature, why do we try create a spacename for every group of features.
If Microsoft WORD were to be developed in these bubbly days, it would have been like this.
#1.Microsoft WORD will have very basic features like file open, edit and save.
#2.Then there will emerge a startup called Importr ,all it would do is File->Import and File->Export functionality for WORD.
#3.Then there will be another startup Tackr for Tools->Track Changes functionality.
#4.There will be dozen other startups like Formattr, Footr etc. you get the point.
#5.Then a website WordCrunch will showup and profiles these companies with great buzz
#6.Soon there will be tens of startups surface, in each of these categories doing more or less same.They do it because it is easy to do and costs less moreover VC’s would throw some easy money.
Phew, I am glad WORD was not developed this way It is ridiculous to see each enhancement in product cycle is a company by itself.
I see a huge opportunity for a big firm like Google or yahoo or new one — to come up as a web platform — they will provie and host the 2.0 framework – configurable data model, 2.0 screen templates, socialing data objects, rss’ing the data objects – and then you configure them (screens,data model and social objects) and you have a site like 30boxes in short period of time. basically most of the existing 2.0 startups can be developed this way, otherwise there is lot of duplicate efforts.
Sorry for the long post but I am sure I am making sense to lot of people here.
Kevin,
Do you want to relaunch IMSmarter with me?
-david
In the context of monitoring information online in a time sensitive environment (PR people monitoring a crisis, monitoring competitive intelligence etc…) nothing beats Klipfolio….
With regards to bridging the gap between RSS, IM, SMS and e-mail… You have to give the crown to Rasasa, it works great.
Good to see competition in this space.
Cruncher, I’ve got to disagree with you. Word would not have worked out like that because it is a desktop application with little ability to interact beyond it. But Word also sucks, a lot.
The dynamic and shared nature of web apps these days is what has been driving innovation in the area, in my opinion. One company can’t release all the innovations we need because there is just way too much to do. And once a company becomes big enough to have enough devs to implement all the sweet features we need, it no doubt is suffering from Big Useless Company Syndrome.
The compromise we have settled on is open standards like RSS and open APIs for interoperation. I don’t think we could be as successful any other way.
I agree with the Big Useless Company Syndrome, that is why I think there should be a web platform developed,hosted, bandwidth provided.
Then all these startups are like what extensions are to firefox – developers will innovate and add various extensions of these social concepts. My thinking comes from the fact that most of thes startups are duplicatng lot of stuff in the name of innovation. I can develop delicious framework in a month or so with couple of developers, not a problem.It is that easy, I am not exaggerating. It does not mean I start a new startup. It is unncessarily giving the hope to new startups that there is a market there and money to be made.
You got also IntantFeed by BiginJapan http://www.biggu.com/
Mr. Kirkpatrick: Nice writeup.
Small nitpick: a bit of research shows that Microsoft bought MessageCast a while ago, which they rebranded MSN Alerts.
http://signup-b...chure/index.jsp
It’s basically RSS to IM, email, and mobile devices. I don’t use it (don’t use MSN messenger, and have found there to be a time lag problem) but the core service is the same as the companies mentioned. It’s also fairly important to be aware when a Big 3 company has a similar/identical service. Not only does it limit the acquisition options, but it makes it considerably harder to get funding for that category of companies.
Yahoo Alerts has also had this since February, sending to email, Y Messenger and SMS.
Oops, it was actually last november and it was even covered by techcrunch.
Guys
Check out MSN Alerts – it does IM, SMS and email.
AOL itself has had this for some time, its integrated into its Alerts feature. alerts.aol.com. Jsut put any rss feed in and it will sned you a message with updates. It can send to IM, mail, phone ect as well and it free.