You probably know by now that RSS feeds are really handy and keep you up to date on all sorts of things. RSS Feed has become an effective way of gaining knowledge and news update on certain topics without going to the actual website provider(s).
RSS Feed type of services’ innovation and growth has become more and more mature and has increased significantly from, let’s say, 1-2 years ago. The buzz on the RSS reader on the web today is the Instant Messenger and/or Mobile Phone RSS Feed delivery services. Such innovation can now be found on several websites on the internet.
Today, WorldTechLogic will be posting a few of them. Here they are:
Rasasa, a Netherland’s web service, will keep you in touch with your favorite news sources. It delivers the news to your instant messenger if you’re online and to your mobile phone (currently unsupported by US mobile vendors), or to your email address if you’re offline. With Rasasa, you can filter which feed is important enough to receive on your phone, the time you want to receive the feeds (e.g. just during office hours, etc) and apply filters to each feed to make sure you only receive the important bits.
To make sure you don’t have to reinsert your previously collected feeds, there’s an option to import your OPML formatted feed-list. Additionally, Rasasa creates a new personalized feed that combines all of the feeds and filters you’ve inserted into your account.
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 is updated. Immedi.At works with major IM carriers including MSN Messenger, Jabber, AIM, and ICQ (Yahoo! support will be coming soon).
With Immedi.At, you don’t need to download or signup for anything. All you need to do is simply add a single link to your favorites or link bar, and click that link whenever you visit a site you want to track. You can stop receiving updates at anytime.
FeedCrier is a new service, developed by Adam Kalsey, former CEO and founder of Pheedo, which allows you to subscribe to any RSS feed using your AOL Instant Messenger account (currently), and later on, using any instant messenger softwares. There’s 2 types of service with FeedCrier, the Free and the Pro service. If you are currently subscribing to lots of feeds and can’t miss alerts when you’re offline, you may opt to choose the Pro service for only $4 per month (you can cancel the service at any time).
ZapTXT is another new service with similar business model. It allows you to define search criteria for your RSS feeds and OPML and then notifies you via email, SMS or Instant Messenger when a new entry contains your search keywords. To get started, you need to set up a task on ZapTXT that will monitor and filter RSS feeds and send you notifications via email or SMS when a new RSS entry meets your specifications. When you get the SMS notification, you start the widget and then you can read the whole post and take action on it. Instead of having to work within the confines of an SMS message with a maximum of 160 characters, you can read the whole text in a convenient format.
Another added feature with all of the above services is that you will be able to give your readers / visitors the power of instant alerts from your web site, by adding subscription buttons on your website. By doing so, your readers will always know when you update your site — even if they don’t use a news reader. A must have feature for this type of service, indeed.
These type of services help shaping up how the RSS delivery services are being done. The newer web, FeedCrier and ZapTXT, although faced strong competitors already on the business model (Rasasa, Immedi.At), should think of new features that give more values to their users, and that would differentiate their services even more from the existing web services. Many startups companies have failed by simply following what the “big boys” are doing; and not by innovating new services/model. Hopefully, both new services (and others to come) will create more innovations that will bring this business model to a higher level in the future.