Joseph Scott’s Blog

• The Prologuer Bot @ Webcracy - Some basic IM and Prologue integration
  Tags: im bot prologue wordpress

• CSS Reference - This looks promising.
  Tags: css reference

Over the weekend Adam Kalsey announced his new service, Feed Crier. Feed Crier pushes RSS/ATOM feeds though AIM (other IM networks are reported to be supported later). Subscribing to a feed is as simple as IM’ing feedcrier with ’subscribe ‘ on AIM.

Feed Crier accounts come in two flavors, free and the $4 per month Pro account. The free account allows you to subscribe up to 3 feeds. The Pro account allows for unlimited feeds, no advertising (?), feed summaries and the ability to manage your feeds via the web. I’m not sure if the no advertising feature of the Pro account means that that Feed Crier won’t display their own ads or if they’ll strip ads from feeds you subscribe to.

I was able to subscribe to my own feed for this blog and got a quick response asking me to click on a URL to verify my subscription. Once I verified Feed Crier sent me messages containing a linked title to recent entries. Unsubscribing was just as easy, I sent ‘unsubscribe ‘ to Feed Crier and quickly got a response back.

I’m not a big user of IM so I don’t know that I’ll make much use of this. As a concept though I think this is a neat idea. With the popularity of feeds this allows you to glue pretty much any data to your IM client. I could see this being really useful for those who want to keep very close tabs on a feed. And if you are using this on Mac OS X then Growl makes it even more awesome.

I’m curious how Adam is tracking updates to feeds. When you subscribe to a feed does Feed Crier start polling that feed? Perhaps he’ll be looking at adding a ping server to get notifications of feed updates.

So the rumors about Google offering an IM (Instant Message) service appear to be true. There are already instructions on how to connect to their Jabber server. All you need is a GMail account. I’m on Google Talk right now using iChat on Mac OS X.

Servername: talk.google.com
Username: yourusername@gmail.com
Password: yourgmailpassword.

I’m curious to see where they’ll take this. The obvious thing that Google could add to IM is the ability to include your logged conversations in search results.

UPDATE 9:00pm 23 Aug 2005: The official Google Talk site is now live.

UPDATE 8:45am 24 Aug 2005: Someone has already discovered an easter egg in Google Talk:

In the about box (right click the taskbar icon) there should be this
play 23 21 13 16 21 19 . 7 1 13 5
substitute letters for numbers and you get
“wumpus.game”
add this to to your freinds list minus the quotes and play an old irc game!

I haven’t been able to make this work yet, I’m still waiting for my invitation to be approved.

UPDATE 10:15am 24 Aug 2005: An announcement was posted to the Google Blog this morning.